- CAMARILLO, Calif. -- When
17-year-old Mallory Gompert's friends learn that the weird growl in her
car comes from a black box her folks use to monitor every second of her
driving, they all say the same thing: ''Don't tell my parents about that
thing!''
-
- But the secret is out. In this Southern California town
-- rocked recently by fatal crashes involving teens -- parents are increasingly
asking Mallory's dad and his co-workers at Road Safety International when
they can get a black box for their own kid's car.
The Camarillo-based company says the $280 device will be in stores nationwide
by November. Called SafeForce, it records such data as the car's speed
and growls warnings when the driver is going too fast or turning too hard.
Parents can check the box later and see for themselves just how fast their
teenager was driving.
It's far too soon to tell if the new tool will help teens drive more safely.
Prototypes, developed from a more complicated device used on emergency
vehicles, have been installed in only a handful of private passenger cars.
But evidence shows that the devices on emergency vehicles have reduced
accidents in ambulances and firetrucks.
The black box is the latest of various tools the nation is using to steer
teens into safer driving. About a dozen services have cropped up that allow
parents, for a fee, to slap a bumper sticker on the family car that asks
other drivers to report teen driving behavior on a toll-free telephone
line. And many states use graduated drivers' license programs to give teens
more road experience and adult supervision before they are granted unrestricted
licenses.
Summer is when kids need that oversight most. With school out, these inexperienced
and exuberant drivers are behind the wheel more. That makes July and August
the deadliest months for teenage drivers.At greatest risk are the youngest
drivers: They die at higher rates than any other drivers. A USA TODAY analysis
of federal data has found that while the 1,134 drivers ages 15, 16 and
17 who were killed in crashes in 2000 made up only a small part of the
25,492 drivers killed in vehicle crashes, those ages represent the smallest
number of licensed drivers. Teen drivers die at more than twice the rate
of all drivers.
''This is really a public health issue,'' says Bella Dinh-Zarr, a former
traffic safety researcher for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
who now is the director of road safety policy for the American Automobile
Association (AAA). ''Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death
for people 1 to 35.''
States are struggling to keep kids safe. Some states do better than others.
The USA TODAY analysis found that Alaska, for instance, has a death rate
among teen drivers that is more than twice the national average. North
Dakota and Rhode Island have rates less than half the national average.
More than 30 states have passed laws -- known as graduated license laws
-- that attempt to force kids to drive more with a parent before they get
their own licenses. The teens may get a provisional license until they've
spent a certain number of hours behind the wheel, accompanied by a parent
or guardian. At the same time, laws prohibiting drunken driving and mandating
use of seat belts are tougher than at any time in driving history. But
the key, Dinh-Zarr and others say, is enforcement.
''Even when states do have tougher teen driving laws,'' Dinh-Zarr says,
''the problem may be that parents don't know they have this tool. Or the
enforcement of these laws may not be very good in these states.''
Watching the rescuers
For 10 years, some ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles
have been equipped with the Road Safety black box that monitors the performance
of drivers. Emergency crews call the boxes growlers -- or worse -- because
they squawk when the rig exceeds pre-set parameters for speed, acceleration,
braking and more.
Their supervisors call the boxes their eyes and ears.
''People drive perfectly when their supervisor is riding with them,'' says
Larry Selditz, president of Road Safety. ''This device allows the supervisor
to stay in that front seat all the time.''
Those $2,500 devices are credited with reducing accident rates and saving
maintenance costs in rescue fleets across the nation. But they also have
surprised even their makers by spotting trends that are otherwise hard
to detect.
Occasionally, a paramedic who ranks among the best drivers in an ambulance
corps based on black box monitoring for months on end will pop up on a
supervisor's hit list for overly aggressive driving. When the supervisor
confronts the medic about the change in driving patterns, the root cause
is often marital trouble or some other stress at home.
''They say, 'I never realized it was bleeding over to my work,' '' says
Scott Springstead, operations supervisor for Sunstar ambulance in Pinellas
County, Fla. ''Without the system, they would be out there driving that
way, and we would never know it.''
Jeff Gompert, Road Safety's vice president, wondered as he traveled around
the nation selling boxes to rescuers whether the same system might work
as well for his teenage daughter, Mallory.
The company (www.roadsafety.com) found a way to make the device cheaper
for family use. The emergency rigs automatically transmit the driving data
via radio to a computer at their home base whenever the rig returns from
a tour. The family version uses a flash memory card -- the postage-stamp-sized
memory card that drives everything from digital cameras to handheld organizers
-- to record the data in the car. It must be carried inside and plugged
into an inexpensive reader on the family PC. Otherwise, the devices are
nearly identical.
''This is something that every car should have,'' says Janice Manzer of
Camarillo. By word of mouth, she managed to get a prototype of the box
in her 17-year-old son's car after he had an accident in the school parking
lot and got a speeding ticket on a city street. ''It's like having a babysitter
in the car.''
The early results from the device's recordings have been eye-popping for
parents.
The box showed that Mallory Gompert -- both smart and polite as she addresses
a reporter -- had a lead foot. The teenager routinely cruised in the family's
Ford Explorer at more than 80 mph, and she took turns dangerously fast.
She had no idea, she says, that she was over the limit. Neither, of course,
did her parents.
''I used to dread it when my dad would come home with his PC and say, 'Let's
see how your driving is,' '' Mallory says.
''She said, 'My life is terrible,' '' her mother Donna recalls. '' 'Why
does Dad have to work for Road Safety? I hate my life!' ''
Now she likes the way the box reminds her to pay attention when she ''spaces
out.'' Because of her improved driving, she says, other parents ask her
to drive their kids, and she hauls her siblings to practices and other
places. ''I was a soccer mom at age 16,'' she says.
And the box has spotted a teen driving trend much the same way it identified
stressed-out ambulance drivers. The device has shown that Mallory and almost
every other teen who has tested the box drive worse when they're racing
to get home before curfew.
That finding in particular rattles the nerves of parents who still ache
for the local families who lost their two teens in a late-night crash just
before Christmas.
The tragic deaths were not unlike other teen driving fatalities that occur,
on average, three times a day across the USA. Feeling good after his high
school team won its basketball game, the teenage driver was tearing through
town in a luxury SUV. He hit a wall at 107 mph. He was 16. The driver and
one passenger died. Two other passengers survived.
''They were just trying to have fun,'' says Ryan Evans, 17, who knew them
and now has the black box in his car. Does he think the box would have
saved them? ''It might have,'' he says.
Inexperience kills
Charles Butler, director of safety services at AAA, says the Road Safety
black box is a potentially useful, one-of-a-kind device. But he says parents
would be mistaken to believe they could install the box in a car and automatically
make their teenager a safer driver.
The biggest threat to young drivers, Butler says, is something the box
can't fix -- inexperience. Teen crashes, he says, are most often caused
by three factors: not looking in the right place at the right time; being
distracted behind the wheel by conversations, music, cellphones or even
daydreams; and not being able to ''manage the space around their car.''
''It takes two to four years'' of driving to become proficient, he says.
Somewhere between 750 and 1,500 miles of driving in various conditions,
he says, the ''crash probability'' begins to drop.
''Inexperienced 16-year-olds have three times as many crashes as 18-year-olds,''
Butler says. ''If the box helps give parents peace of mind, maybe it's
worth it. But if you really want peace of mind, don't let your kid drive
alone. You can be the black box.''
AAA offers tips for parents on how to teach driving. The video and a handbook,
called Teaching Your Teens to Drive: A partnership for survival, cost $21.95
(members get a discount) and are available to everyone through local AAA
chapters or at <http://rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/usatoday/ts_usatoday/inlinks/*http://www.aaa.com
www.aaa.com.
Bryce Riach, 17, says the black box in his 1998 Toyota Tacoma has no impact
on his driving. ''I pretty much beep on every turn,'' he says, one week
after the box was installed. ''It's funny. . . . When it starts making
noise, I just turn the (punk) music up,'' he says. ''If my parents were
looking at my results, it would be a bigger factor.''
His parents know he has the box in his car as part of a study for Road
Safety, but they have not yet seen any of his performance reports. Bryce
says his parents don't know how he drives. ''When I drive with them, I
drive a lot safer, so they don't really know,'' he says.
Road Safety's Selditz agreed to display the previous five days of Bryce's
driving on the company computer. The screen is full of red violations.
There are 34 turns where at least half of the tires' traction was lost
to high speed. There are more than 70 minutes of driving faster than 80
mph.
But one moment stands out. At 8:55 p.m. on the previous Thursday, he had
lost nearly 70% of his traction while making a hard left turn. He had his
headlights on, but he was not wearing his seat belt.
Bryce grins. ''That is the island by my house,'' he explains. ''It's an
illegal turn, but if I don't make that turn I have to go up a mile and
make a U-turn.''
When a reporter tells his father, Ron Riach, a former firefighter, about
the turn, the father of four young drivers is shocked: ''That is a revelation.
Especially about the seat belt. I have drilled that into their heads.''
Bryce has heard the horror stories his dad has brought home from years
on the street as a firefighter. But the boy says he doesn't worry about
getting hurt.
''After I come close to getting into an accident, I think about what happened
to those other people,'' he says. ''But when I'm speeding, I don't really
think about it.''
Nearly two months have passed since Bryce got the black box. His parents
still haven't looked at his black box reports, but constant reviews by
Road Safety officials -- who have threatened to remove the box and a $50-a-week
payment for his participation -- have begun to tame his driving.
''My driving has changed a lot,'' he says. ''I don't really like it, but
it's good for me. It was hard to get used to, but now that I am used to
it, I can still get around quickly.''
His dad says Bryce has learned to drive within the box's parameters. ''He's
safer,'' Ron Riach says, ''but to what extent, who knows.''
- Copyright © 2002 USA TODAY, a division of www.gannett.com
Gannett Co. Inc.
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