Teen Driving
When Good Hands® People Advocate
Chris Longman had a friend named Fidel. Two years older than Chris, Fidel was a recent high school graduate and about to be the first in his family to attend college-when he went drag racing one August night.
Fidel's death in a car crash was another in a string at Herricks High on Long Island, and Chris had seen enough. He volunteered to help lead a student group focused on driving safety. They got a local repair shop to donate a wrecked car and placed it outside the school's main entrance with a sign: "Drive Safe." They produced television commercials and plastered the walls with posters. They organized an upperclass assembly, where the emergency responder who tried to save Fidel tearfully told students he didn't want to see any of them in the same situation. The awareness program won an award from The Allstate Foundation as the best student-led smart driving campaign in the country.
But it was only one of many efforts, dating back decades, that have made Allstate a leading advocate for teen driving safety. Car crashes are the biggest cause of death among adolescents. Not drugs. Not suicide. Not violence. And Allstate takes the problem personally; many agency owners around the country know families touched by such tragedies.
That's why the company has pushed for safer cars and stronger licensing requirements, including a uniform federal standard for Graduated Driver Licensing laws. But changing rules and regulations won't be enough; experts say it's also important to change behaviors and assumptions. So The Foundation works directly with teens in a national peer-based program called Keep the Drive.
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Allstate's Teen Safe Driving Campaign
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In hundreds of communities, Keep the Drive focuses not just on obvious threats like speeding and drinking. It highlights distractions and dangers like having too many friends in the car or talking on the phone behind the wheel. Most recently, Allstate sounded the alarm about what teens themselves say is the biggest danger-texting while driving.
Allstate also educates parents about teen driving issues, works with law enforcement, schools, community groups, physicians-anyone who touches and influences the lives of adolescents.
Fortunately, the statistics are starting to turn the corner. When the program began in 2005, more than 14 teens died every day in car crashes. In 2008, the number dropped to 11 per day.
The news is good from Herricks High as well: no major accidents, injuries or deaths among student drivers since the program began in the fall of 2007. Part of the money The Allstate Foundation awarded the school funded a memorial plaque listing the names of all Herricks students killed in car crashes over the past 50 years. Fidel's parents came to the dedication; it helped, they told Chris Longman, knowing that so much was being done to keep other kids off that list in the future.