January is National Teen Driving Awareness Month, and with the beginning of a new year, it is good to think about ways to improve and enhance our lives and the world around us. In honor of National Teen Driving Awareness Month, Attorney Mike White appeared on WAKA CBS 8 and WBMM CW 22 with host Olivia Deas, to discuss teen driving safety. It is important to discuss with your teenage driver accident stats and tips to keep them safe on the roads.
According to the CDC, car accidents are the #1 cause of death among teenagers. In fact, 6 teenagers lose their lives in car accidents every day. This number is staggering, so if a little extra talk with your teenagers helps reduce this number, that is the goal.
Olivia Deas, host of WAKA CBS 8 and WBMM CW 22:
Welcome back. We have Mike White here from Floyd Hunter Injury Law Firm to talk about teen driving safety. Good to have you here.
Attorney Mike White:
Good to be back, thanks.
Olivia:
We appreciate it. You guys do all kinds of injury law.
Attorney Mike White:
We do, all types of injury law, but predominantly auto and truck wreck cases.
Olivia:
Alright, and this is a big deal within what you do, I’m sure, is the teen driving and all the distractions that teens have.
Attorney Mike White:
It really is. Two real things to concern yourself with with teen driving: one, the huge prevalence of accidents with teenagers. Teenagers are about–according to the Centers for Disease Control–about three times as likely per mile driven to have an accident. And the number one cause of death for teenagers nationally is auto accidents. So you want to cut down on accidents, and then find ways to make them less dangerous when you do have an accident.
Olivia:
You know, I can remember when I’d just gotten my license when I was 16, and everyone saying, “Oh, she’s so young. She’s gonna be out on the road by herself.” And I thought, “I’m not that young, this is no big deal.” But now that, you know, that I’m older, you think about a 16-year-old having a license out there with everyone else–that’s a scary thing.
Attorney Mike White:
No experience. And the people that have the less experience, like kids, are the ones to be more offended and bothered by saying, “Be careful,” or, “drive slower,” or do whatever you need to do.
Olivia:
Absolutely. You were talking about some kind of law that Alabama has that it’s–
Attorney Mike White:
Alabama has a progressive driver’s license law so that teens need to have a permit for at least six months to drive on their own. They cannot drive between midnight and 6:00 a.m., with some exceptions for church and doing certain things: going to school or work. And they have to have–can’t have but one person, a teenager, with them at a time for a certain age. It’s complicated and it’d be easy to look it up through the state, al.gov, and look it up there. But it keeps from having–like when I got my license when I was fifteen if you can imagine, I could take eight people with me because cars were big back then, go drive around, and, you know, you just don’t have that. And that’s a good thing that Alabama’s done.
Olivia:
We were talking about texting and driving earlier, and, you know, since you guys do injury law, and let’s say someone does get hit by a teen that’s texting or something like that. Avoiding that type of lawsuit, I guess, you know, parents avoiding that type of lawsuit.
Attorney Mike White:
One thing that’s as simple as anything I know of is: require your kids to keep their phones in the trunk. I have one of my old, good friends who had three kids driving that were teenagers at once, and his daughter always–they always had to do it. But his daughter once didn’t. She looked down, and she ran into a tree of all things going around a curve. It’s a real simple thing to do. We have the first generation of drivers that have never been without a phone. People giving their kids phones at age ten. So it’s harder–it gets progressively harder, but distracted driving is the single biggest cause of accidents among teens. And then, just wearing a seatbelt. Teenagers–two-thirds of the deaths for teenagers nationally–which is, you know, almost 2,000 people just for those–they’re not wearing a seatbelt.
Olivia:
Right. Very, very important. We do a lot of stories on that. Mike, thank you so much for being here.
Attorney Mike White:
Thank you so much for having me.
Olivia:
We appreciate it. Alright, we’ll be right back.