Statewide Iowa — (RI) — This is Teen Driver Safety Week and Iowa leaders suggest parents have a conversation with their teens about the rules of the road.
Genie Clemens, youth coordinator for the Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau, says 22 Iowans under the age of 20 were killed in crashes last year.
In 2016, there were nearly 23-hundred people killed in crashes involving a teen driver nationwide, and 814 of those killed were the teen drivers. Clemens says alcohol and drugs often play a factor in teen crashes and the odds are worse if a teen driver has one or more teen passengers.
The radio, the cell phone and passengers can all create potentially-deadly distractions for teen drivers, and Clemens warns them to pay attention to the task at hand — driving.
A Triple-A study found that when a teen driver has only teen passengers in their vehicle, the fatality rate for all people involved in a crash increased 51-percent.
