Page 34 - AAA Magazine – AAA Ohio Auto Club – May 2019

Experience is Key to Safer Roads
By Kimberly Schwind
Troy and Stacy Schlotterbeck did everything they thought they were supposed to do when teaching their son, Gavin, to drive. They enrolled him in driver education and worked with him during the six months or so that he had his learner’s permit. They never could have anticipated what would happen to him and his girlfriend Hunter McClelland.
On July 17, 2017, Gavin was driving with Hunter, when something caused him to go over the berm. He overcorrected into the path of an oncoming Jeep. Both he and Hunter were killed. Crash investigations revealed that Gavin wasn’t texting, speeding or impaired.
“They’ve basically said that the cause is inexperience,” said Stacy Schlotterbeck. “He went off the berm and overcorrected because he didn’t have the experience to know that you can’t just jerk the wheel.”
Teen crashes and fatalities are all too frequent, especially during the summer months, known as the “100 Deadliest Days” for teen drivers. AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety research shows new teen drivers, 16-17 years old, are three times as likely as adults to be involved in a deadly crash. It’s an issue that affects all road users, since the AAA Foundation also found about two-thirds of the people injured or killed in teen driver crashes are someone other than the teen driver.
“The No. 1 reason new teen drivers crash is driver error due to lack of experience, which leads to loss of control of the vehicle,” said Mark Bloom, president and founder of the AAA Approved Driving School, Better Ohio Teen Drivers, a non-profit advanced driver training program that gives drivers a better understanding of vehicle dynamics and trains them how to react in situations where things go wrong.
“A lot of parents don’t know that car crashes are the No. 1 killer of teenagers,” said Bloom. “It’s been that way for decades. So, why are we putting up with that?”
That’s the question the Schlotterbecks, Hunter’s mom Stephanie McClelland and many others in Ohio are asking.
The fact is Ohio’s system for licensing young drivers hasn’t kept up with the latest research on teen driver
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Gavin Schlotterbeck and Hunter McClelland
crashes and how to prevent them. As a result, young driver crashes in Ohio remain unnecessarily high.
“I think parents are ready to have their kids get a license just because of the busy lives that everybody has, but I do not think that they are aware of statistics,” said Troy Schlotterbeck.
In 2016, AAA took the first steps in trying to fix this by forming the Ohio Graduated Driver Licensing Coalition,
a broad-based coalition made up of law enforcement, healthcare, insurance, parents, driver training, researchers and other traffic safety advocates from across the state. The coalition’s goal is to save lives by modernizing Ohio’s young driver licensing system.
The coalition proposes two research-based adjustments to Ohio’s young driver licensing system: • Lengthen the temporary instruction permit phase
from 6 to 12 months, and
• Ensure newly licensed teen drivers are supervised
when driving after 10 p.m. for the first six months of licensure.