Allstate Insurance is operating a public awareness campaign across the country to educate drivers, most especially the younger ones, about the dangers of distracted driving. Plenty of parents and their teenage children have participated in the auto insurance company’s “Family Driver Challenge” program, learning more about how text messaging and other forms of multitasking behind the wheel could lead to an auto accident.
Amy Moore, spokesperson of Allstate Insurance, said in a statement that in the program they are not teaching their participants how to send text messages while driving but to show them what the consequences of doing so are.
The “Family Driver Challenge” is hosted in 38 cities, where professional instructors guide teams of parents and teenagers in an obstacle course in which they have to pass while being distracted by phone calls, incoming text messages, eating, drinking, and even noisy passengers. The participants had to drive through the course several times with tem members making all sorts of distractions to bother them.
Through this, people would further understand that having such distractions in the car would not only prevent them from completing the course but could also double their chances of getting into an auto accident in real life driving. Then, the participants had to make a public pledge to drive more carefully and safely. Moore said that they had to make the parents and teenagers to make a family pledge to at least minimize their distractions while driving by marking their thumbprint on the program banner.
Franklin Kinman and his mother, some of the participants, said that the program had made a big difference in how he would drive. According to Kinman, he has learned that text messaging while driving could be very dangerous so he would change the way he drives.
The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration showed facts and figures that over 25% of crashes and around 6, 000 fatalities that had occurred last 2008 are due to distracted driving. Also, car accidents continue to be the primary killer of teenagers in the country most especially those drivers who are under 20 years of age. A survey also shows that even older and more experienced drivers are also likely to get into an accident even when the younger ones have a higher risk of getting into one, because it shows that 90% of surveyed teenage drivers say that their parents were the main influence of their driving habits.
