Young drivers: the sobering statistics
But a couple of days ago I read a statistic that transported me. It made me shudder. It took me back to a warm summer night in 1986. I was 17. I was at the wheel of a third-hand blue Vauxhall Chevette having passed my driving test a month or two back. In the car with me, my best mate in the passenger seat. And three girls – one of whom I secretly fancied – wedged into the back, chattering and laughing. No rear seatbelts in those days. We’d been to a barn dance and we’d had fun. As one of the oldest in my year group I was one of the first to pass my test. And driving home was my chance to show off a little. I like to think I was a fairly responsible teenager. But there I was hurtling round bends on narrow country roads in the dark, gunning the engine, breaking late, changing down the gears… driving like a lunatic… just waiting for one of the girls to ask me to slow down. But they didn’t.
So I drove faster.
And then there was the blind bend. I had one of those ‘life flashing before the eyes’ moments, hit the break peddle as hard as I could, briefly aware that no one else in the car realised quite how much danger we were in, amazed at how much longer it took for the car to slow down, fully loaded with passengers. Somehow we came to a halt a couple of feet from a high brick wall on the wrong side of the road. If there had been a car coming the other way, we’d have been seriously hurt. I dread to think what would have happened to the girls without seatbelts on.
The risk of a fatal collision is almost three times greater for a young driver with three or more passengers than for one driving alone.
The ABI was quoting from a wide-ranging government consultation paper about learning to drive.
A couple more numbers from this paper make the message even clearer:
- 500,000 people under the age of 25 pass their driving test each year. A fifth of them have an accident within 6 months of qualifying.
- Whilst the overall figures for deaths on the road in the UK have fallen consistently since the mid-1990s, around 16% MORE young drivers (aged 16 to 19) are killed today than 15 years ago.
For me – as someone who nearly became one of these stastics – the bit about carrying passengers remains particularly striking. Whilst drinking and driving, and driving in the dark seem like obvious things that could increase the risk of an accident, having friends in the car just wouldn’t have crossed my mind as presenting greater risk.
Getting new, young drivers to understand just how responsible they are for the safety of the people they are carrying in their cars seems like something to be doing right now. In particular making young males keep cool heads despite the surge of testosterone-fueled excitement about being behind the wheel with a bunch of mates in the car… And telling girls not to be afraid to shout ‘Slow down!’ if they feel unsafe as passengers has to be part of that as well.
Peer pressure can be a powerful thing.
IMAGE by Flickr users
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Originally posted 2008-10-10 16:09:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
