About TDS
Teens in the Driver Seat – America’s first peer-to-peer safety program for young drivers
Too many teens are dying.
Find a TDS representative in your area to get TDS started at your school.
Car crashes kill more young people than any other cause, accounting for nearly half of all teen deaths in America each year. About 6,000 U.S. teens die each year in car crashes; that’s the equivalent of a commercial jet loaded with teenagers crashing once every week for an entire year.
On a per-mile driven basis, teens are far more likely to die in a car crash than more experienced drivers. The majority of teen passenger deaths happen when another teenager is driving.
For every American teen killed in a car crash, about 100 more are injured. Every 15 minutes, another teenager becomes a statistic.
Car crashes involving teenage drivers cost our nation more than $41 billion every year; the annual cost in Texas is more than $3.5 billion.
Most people don’t know why.
The most common causes of teen driving crashes are the ones that young drivers (and their parents) know the least about. Combined with a lack of driving experience, the top three dangers are:
- Driving at night
- Speeding and street racing
- Distractions, such as cell phones/texting and too many teen passengers
Alcohol and low seat belt use create dangers as well, but not as frequently as the top three causes. In fact, alcohol is a factor in only 12 percent of the crashes involving the youngest drivers on the road.
Most teens are unaware of the driving restrictions imposed on them by the Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) laws in Texas and other states.
Serious crashes are more frequent for teens learning through parent-taught driver education. Teens are a key part of the solution. Started in 2002, Teens in the Driver Seat is the first program to involve young drivers in developing and delivering safety messages to their peers.
Teens help shape the program and are responsible for implementing it; TTI provides the science, guidance and project resources.
TDS is available to schools and youth groups at no cost in Texas.
TDS works.
TDS program assessments show risk awareness levels increasing by up to 200 percent.
Cell phone use at some TDS program schools has been shown to drop by 30 percent, and seat belt use has gone up by over 10 percent.
In Texas, teen crash deaths are down 32 percent and the number of teenage drivers involved in fatal crashes has dropped 33 percent since the TDS program began. The recent decline in teen crash deaths in Texas is more than twice the national average.
The city of Garland experienced 12 teen traffic fatalities in the four years before launching a TDS program; the same city has seen only one teen traffic death in the two years since launching TDS. Before TDS, teen involvement in all crashes was 28 percent; after TDS, teen involvement in crashes dropped to 16 percent.
More than 200 schools in Texas now have implemented TDS programs. The program is now being deployed in two states outside Texas.
The impressive growth of TDS, coupled with the rapid growth of social networking among teens, creates the potential for a “safety culture” among young people and the prospect of saving hundreds of lives each year.
TDS partners
Contact
Russell Henk
Texas Transportation Institute
(210) 979-9411
r-henk@tamu.edu