This is a guest post by Jeff Larson, President, of Safe Roads Alliance. I appreciate the companies passion for safer roads. It’s a sad and tragic fact that the number one cause of teen deaths in America is vehicular crashes. This is one of the primary reasons that my organization, Safe Roads Alliance, has developed The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program, and its companion mobile app, RoadReadyTM. Our goal is to help reverse this statistic by providing parents with tools to help them through the Learner’s Permit process with their teen. Our goal is to help parents make their teen to become a safer, smarter driver.
At times it may not seem like it, but the reality is that parents have a great influence over their teen’s behavior, specifically their teen’s driving behavior. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia released a study in 2012 showing that when parents are highly involved in teaching teens to drive, teens are 50% less likely to crash, 71% less likely to drive intoxicated, 2x more likely to wear seat belts, and 30% less likely to use a cell phone. Even still, we know it can be terrifying to sit in the passenger seat with a teen who is driving for the first time, even the most mature teen.
First and foremost, its our job as parents to ensure teens have lots of experience behind the wheel prior to receiving their license. Inexperience is often cited as the primary factor for high teen crash rates. In fact, to ensure teens receive more experience nearly every state now requires that parents drive with their teens before they get their license. The requirement usually ranges from 30 to 70 hours.
Our program’s FREE mobile app, RoadReady is a user-friendly tool for parents and teens to log this time and to reiterate the importance of teens encountering a wide range of driving experiences – in varying weather conditions and times of day as well as on different road types. The app, currently available on the App StoreSM with a planned Android release early in 2014, uses GPS to map your driving history and logs the time you spend together behind the wheel against your state’s daytime and nighttime driving requirements. RoadReady also provides parents with pointers to help with the learning process.
RoadReady helps to ensure you are spending the necessary time with your teen behind the wheel. In keeping a paper log, parents (and teens) tend to wildly overstate how long they have driven together. If you drive for 40 minutes, you might be tempted to log an hour. Over a 6-month time span this can lead to greatly misrepresenting the time spent and result in teens hitting the road independently with insufficient experience – putting them in greater danger. With RoadReady the time you spend together is accurately tracked - 40 minutes is 40 minutes.
As an added bonus users can log into their RoadReady account from multiple devices and if you have two teens going through the process at the same time, you can set up multiple drivers. Instead of carrying a paper log around for 6-12 months, passing it from car to car, and from one parent to the next, sometimes from one home to another, RoadReady can be used on everyone’s phone: mom, dad and junior.
Finally, when teens have met the supervised driving requirement, RoadReady generates a log that can be downloaded and presented at your local DMV to verify that your teen’s driving requirement has been met.
And don’t worry about the app being a distraction during your driving sessions – just click start, put the phone away, and focus on your teen's driving.
Now that you are logging your driving time together, you will need to know what lessons to focus on when driving. The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program is an award-winning curriculum for parents that offers suggestions, advice and a step-by-step teaching guide for when you are out on the road together. The curriculum is currently distributed at DMV licensing centers in 12 states (MA, RI, VT, ME, DE, NC, MI, NE, CO, ID,and AK) with more states working toward offering the program. The program is offered to the states, parents and teens at no cost thanks to support from Ford Motor Company and other local sponsors.
Our goal is to ensure that you as parents are correctly utilizing the state required driving hours and help your teen become a safer, smarter driver. The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program and RoadReady mobile app are tools for you and we encourage you to use them to keep your child safe on the road.