When you look into the reasons why teens have such a high car accident rate, many of them could apply to drivers of any age.
For instance, some experts cite speeding, distracted driving and night driving as common contributing factors. While this is certainly true, they’re not exclusive to teens. Adults can be distracted by friends or cellphones, they can crash at night when it’s harder to see and react to the road around them, and they can break the speed limit.
However, there are sometimes contributing factors that may link more directly to teens themselves.
When the National Young Driver Survey (NYDS) was given out, for example, teens were asked how they would define speeding. It seemed simple enough; breaking the speed limit at all, even by just one mile per hour, counts as speeding. It may not be a huge difference, but it means people have less reaction time and potentially aren’t moving with the flow of traffic.
Teens, though, said they didn’t think of it as speeding until the car was going a minimum of 10 miles per hour past the legal limit. That means they wouldn’t think going 34 miles per hour in a 25-MPH zone was really speeding.
This perhaps sheds light on excessive speeding as teens don’t actually think they’re doing anything wrong. That could be part of the reason why 21 percent of serious accidents caused by teens are linked to speeding.
Have you been hit by a teen driver or injured while riding with one? If so, you may have a right to financial compensation for those injuries.
Source: Teen Driver Source, “Why Teens May Crash,” accessed Nov. 03, 2017
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