BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Alabama pediatricians will start
distributing information about safe driving habits to their teenage patients
and the patients parents as part of a new effort to combat teen driver
fatalities, health officials said today.
A 2008 study by Allstate Insurance ranked the state the second most dangerous
in the country for teen drivers, just behind Mississippi. Of the nation’s 50
largest metropolitan areas, the Birmingham-Hoover area was the fifth deadliest
for those drivers, the study showed.
The Alabama Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics was one of eight
groups nationwide to receive a safe driving grant from the Allstate Foundation
to help combat that problem.
“In any given year, vehicular deaths account for a third to half of all
preventable child deaths in Alabama,” said Richard Burleson, director of the
injury prevention division of the Alabama Department of Public Health.
Too few people, Burleson said, are aware of a graduated driver’s license
modified by the Alabama legislature in 2010.
Under the 2010 law, it is illegal for a 16-year-old driver (and 17-year-old
drivers who have been licensed less than six months) to drive with more than
one non-family member passenger.
Those drivers also cannot drive between midnight and 6 a.m. unless they are
with an adult, going to or from work, a school event or a church event.
There are also exemptions for emergencies or if the driver is going hunting or
fishing with the appropriate license.
To spread awareness of that law, the Alabama
While a statewide study indicates the number of teens who get
their drivers license after completing a parent-taught program continues to
rise, that may not be the case in Midland.
Before the parent-taught driver education program was created in 1997, 52
percent of teenagers applying for their license had completed it at school. By
2005, that number had dropped to only 12 percent, with 38.9 percent of teen
drivers learning at home with their parents, according to “Parent Taught Driver
Education in Texas: A Comparative Evaluation,” a study published in by the
Texas Transportation Agency for the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration.
MISD instructor Joseph Anthony Madrid said he hasn’t seen his classes shrink by
that much during the last 10 years.
“We’ve got 171 kids enrolled at Lee this semester and with night classes,
spring classes and the summer, we’ll teach about 750 kids this year,” said
Madrid, who has taught driver education for 40 years.
While fewer students are taking school-based classes, the number of students
who receive their licenses after attending a driving school has remained steady
at about 47.5 percent over the last 15 years, according to the study.
Jim Carver, owner of Big C’s Driving School, said he’s seen this to be true in
Midland, where the number of students taking classes at his school continue to
increase.
“Parents want safety for their children and they’re scared to death to teach
them to drive because they don’t want to make a mistake and hurt their child so
they bring them to me,” said Carver, who thinks most students who learn to
drive through the parent-taught option do so because it may be simpler.
However, it’s also more deadly
A Northampton man convicted of a 2009 drunken-driving accident
that seriously injured a teenager has dropped his lawsuit against PennDOT to
reduce the amount of time that his driver’s license will be suspended.
Instead, John Norton, 49, of Cherokee Drive in Richboro, will file a direct
appeal to a PennDOT administrative court judge to receive more than a year’s
worth of credit toward his license reinstatement, his attorney said Thursday.
Norton has faced sharp public criticism since filing the suit in Bucks County
Court in July against PennDOT requesting that he get credit for the time that
he couldn’t drive following his DUI-accident related arrest — including the
time he spent in prison.
In an April letter to PennDOT, Norton’s first attorney, Rep. Scott Petri,
R-178, asked that the transportation agency give Norton credit toward his
suspension dating back to the day Norton surrendered his license in April 2009.
Norton served a little more than 18 months in prison for the March 2009
accident that severely injured a 14-year-old boy. Police say he was driving
with a blood alcohol content of 0.41 — more than five times the legal limit —
when he slammed into the boy, who was standing on a Richboro sidewalk
