TAMPA, Fla — According to Florida Highway Patrol, our state consistently ranks among the top in the country for distracted driving. Sadly, many of the people involved in these crashes are teens or young drivers.
It’s why Rick Birt, President and CEO of Students Against Destructive Decisions, says they work tirelessly to raise awareness of teen driving safety and curbing distracted driving crashes across Tampa Bay and nationwide.
While you might think less people were out on the roads during a global pandemic, we instead saw more crashes.
“Particularly in the early days of COVID, there wasn’t traffic that you would normally see,” Birt said. “Folks felt a little more comfortable, maybe a little more arrogant, going faster on our roadways, and that resulted in increased deaths.”
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reports while Americans drove less in 2020, because of the pandemic, 38,680 people died in crashes nationwide. That’s the highest number of deaths reported since 2007.
“Every single one of those numbers is a mom, a dad, a brother, a sister, a neighbor, a colleague," Birt said, “Car crashes are totally preventable. A series of choices were made in one of those situations that resulted, unfortunately, in someone losing their life.”
FHP reports that of 48,537 crashes in 2020, 308 were deadly.
It's why SADD has education resources for parents and students called The Passport to Safe Driving and there’s the FHP safety campaign called Put It Down, encouraging all drivers, particularly teens, to pledge to avoid road distractions. The goal? To save lives and make your drive a bit safer.
“We like to talk about driving as both an art and a science where you learn skills just like you were when you’re learning a new instrument or when you’re learning a new job or a task,” Birt explained.
“It’s a job or a task that teens will use for the rest of their lives. So, establishing good habits of being really focused on that art of driving is really important.”