The Biggest Unspoken Threat to Teenage Lives by Sam Beldock

The Biggest Unspoken Threat to Teenage Lives by Sam Beldock

Over the past couple of years, a lot of the focus of teenage deaths has been on suicides and rightfully so, however, a possibly bigger threat to these lives is taking place on our roads every day. When I think of the dangers of driving a few things come to mind: my sister’s words that ring more and more true every time I think about them, “I hate driving,” something I never thought I would hear her say. I really understand where she is coming from though, as she had a classmate die in a car crash her sophomore year of high school. I also think about how much I have had to drive in the last 2 and half years since I got my license, and how risky each drive has been and how many close calls I have had. Another thing that constantly crosses my mind is how easily distractible teenagers are, really humans in general, and how the advances in technology have made it so much worse. Every time a driver steps on the road the risk is immense and I have started to understand that as I get older and more experienced on the road. We need to minimize this risk and technology could be a large part of the solution.

Throughout the history of automobiles, advancements have been required to minimize the risk of driving. This has come in the form of stronger materials that can withstand crashes better, and then within the last 50 years seatbelts went from rarely used to required by law. Now extensive courses and learning is required for people to even get their learner’s permit. These actions were taken and they ultimately saved lives, now the biggest problem on the road is how to prevent people from driving either distracted or impaired, problems that impact teenagers daily. Simply saying you can’t text and drive is not enough for a teenager to put away their phone completely on a car ride, some have such an attachment to their phone, their snapchat, their twitter, their tiktok, their instagram, that five minutes without looking at their phone is unbearable. Now this isn’t the fault of the teenagers, technology and social media is an addiction, no easier to quit than nicotine or alcohol. So the question then becomes how do we completely eliminate the ability for one to use their phone while driving. When I was learning to drive, the instructors gave us little phone sleeves to place in the car and put our phones in while driving. These are only marginally effective because it is too easy to pull the phone right out or not put your phone in it at all. The first major advancement I have seen in this area that I believe can make a real impact is sensors placed within a car that are able to tell when a driver is distracted and looking down at their phones. As stated previously, technology is part of the problem but can become part of the solution. This technology exists and the advertisement has already begun with a recent Subaru commercial displaying this alert sensor feature in their newest commercial. This buzzer will be annoying enough that it will almost certainly force the driver to wait until later to send that snapchat, similarly to how most people in new cars will wear their seatbelts because the buzzer won’t stop until they do.

The obvious limitation to this strategy is that almost all cars on the roads don’t have this technology and aren’t that new, which means there also needs to be an intermediate solution that can be used within cars until the technology is able to catch up with every car on the road. An interesting idea would be a form of lockbox or safe which can strap into cars, and can only be opened when the car is in park. The driver would place their phone in the box before leaving their starting location and then no matter how much temptation there would be to check their phone, they wouldn’t be able to unless the car was safely in park. Now this would also obviously require some advanced technology but it would be easier to get to drivers because it wouldn;t require them to get an all new car, they would just need a single piece that could be installed in any car. Obviously it would require significant work and design development to figure out how to implement this idea. Now these ideas may seem drastic and too expensive, however, the only way to solve this problem is by doing something big, because small changes aren’t enough from keeping a random 16 year old from getting distracted, they simply can’t have the option to get distracted. Furthermore, parents will be more than happy to pay for something that will keep their teenager safe.