Second Rule Of Safety ...... Be Safe!

In my first blog post, I talked about how teens are the causes of their own and other’s accidental deaths and how teens are not only distracted by their cellphones, but other people. I also talked about how hazardous teen drivers can be while on their cellphones and that teens need to be more aware about their safety while driving. The one big question that I had ending that blog post was WHY? The why question was for why do people keep on getting distracted and possibly not only putting their lives in danger, but others lives.

In my second blog post, I talked about how crashes are more common among the young drivers than any other age group and in 2009 3,242 teens from the ages of 15-19 lost their lives in crashes where the driver was distracted. I also talked about counting 500 cars, 126 of those drivers were on their phones and 26 of those drivers were actually texting while driving. The one big question that I had ending that blog post was HOW? The how question was for how are we going to stop this and spread awareness. That is the question that I am going to answer in this blog post and how I decided to find out for myself.

This was my pledge(on left) vs. what AllState already had in place(on right)

For my agent of change, I decided to convince a company, like AllState, to make a pledge that new drivers would sign as a friendly reminder not to text and drive. I then decided to ask an expert about their point of view on this topic and how safety is key. I went to an AllState office near me and talked to Ms. Rebecca Clemento about this topic and I had some questions:

What are the biggest dangers of teen driving?

What do you already have in place for managing cell phone use with new drivers? Does AllState have any incentives?

Are there any specific policies in place for teen drivers or new drivers?

Have the laws changed for texting and driving as the technology has changed?

What would be the effectiveness of the idea that I am proposing?

Do you think the laws will need to change for safety in the future? If so, how?

For the most part, I think that my agent of change went pretty well and was inspirational not only to me but to the people that I talked to about this. As I was doing this project, the thing that I enjoyed most was finding out all of this cool information that I never knew existed until I started this project. From this project, I learned that this topic was more widespread than I thought, but not as often talked about.

A recurring question that I had in both of my blog posts was: Why do teens, and even adults, go out in the world of driving and continue to be distracted? This question has still yet to be answered, but with more research this question will be answered someday.

Annotated Bibliography