Driving Skills For Life Meant To Save Lives

With automobile crashes the leading cause of death among teens, the Dunwoody Police Department's Collision Avoidance Training Program hopes to mitigate those statistics by teaching teens real world driving skills that might help them avoid crashes

Lieutenant William Hegwood gives the signal to go from across the closed parking lot. The teen driver is off and running, hitting the gas pedal and accelerating the vehicle quickly. Turning to the right, the teen follows a curved line of orange cones, trying not to hit them.

Once the curved turn is made successfully, the teen's vehicle is moving straight ahead, headed directly at Hegwood, the vehicle picking up speed with every second so to simulate driving on a city street with a speed limit of 35 to 45 miles per hour. When Hegwood feels it's time, he drops his hands and signals for the car to stop immediately. The teen hits the brakes hard, the goal now being stop the car before hitting Hegwood or a second set of orange cones that have been set up in front of him.

Sometimes the vehicle's brakes smoke and shriek the car to a stop, sometimes the vehicle hits the cones. Oftentimes, Hegwood has to jump out of the way of the moving vehicle. These are new drivers, afterall. He even got hit once, and suffered some road rash from having been knocked down.

But according to Hegwood, who used to reconstruct fatal accidents at one point in his 22-year career, putting himself in harm's way is all in the name of the department's Collision Avoidance Training Program, an advanced defensive driving and vehicle control class designed for teenage drivers and sponsored by the National Traffic Safety Academy. The program was started in Tallahassee, Fla. in 1992 by Paul Burris, who lost his own teenage son in a car crash. Dunwoody's is the only driving program of its kind in Georgia at present, teen students have come to attend the class from as far away as Alabama and North Carolina.

"They're (teenagers) on the road with me," Hegwood said in discussing the importance of the program. "Driver's education is good, but it doesn't teach them real life defensive driving."

Once a month, in both the classroom and the closed driving course set up at the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, real life defensive driving skills are what Hegwood and his fellow officers teach enrolled students. They practice steering maneuvers, turning and braking exercises and serpentine and backup skills, the same skills officers in the Police Academy learn. When students complete the class, they can receive up to a 12 percent discount on their auto insurnace, Hegwood said.

"It's awesome, an absolutely fantastic program," said Lt. Oliver Fladrich, also an instructor. "I'd send my kid 10 times. I wish when we all learned to drive there was something like this for us to learn from. It shows the kids that a moderate speed like 45 miles per hour is something that is really hard to control when you have to stop on a dime."

This past Saturday morning, 13 teens were lined up in their vehicles waiting to practice braking and evasive maneuvering techniques. Hegwood said the rainy conditions were an added bonus because those conditions were surely ones all teens would face in driving someday. Dunwoody Police Officers, who ride along with the students while training, serve as instructors and Hegwood's assistants.

According to Fladrich, these officers have seen it all when it comes to teen automobile crashes and collisions.

"It gets old pulling kids out of cars," Fladrich said. "If you ask any police officer here, they can all tell you horrific stories of teenage accidents involving fatalities. And it's the kind of stuff nobody likes to talk about because nobody likes pulling kids out of vehicles. But unfortunately, it's a fact of life. So we're doing what we can here and hopefully can prevent that with the 13 kids here… It absolutely makes a difference."

Ann Gardner, a 16-year-old Dunwoody High School student taking the class, agreed with Fladrich.

"I didn't particularly want to attend at first but I'm glad I did," she said.

Gardner went as far as saying she'd recommend the class to her friends.

That feeling was also shared by fellow Dunwoody High School student Tyler Hancock, a junior who'd been driving for two years and whose mother wanted him to take the class.

"I've already told a couple of my friends, 'Hey, guess what, I'm with the cops, I can speed and it's ok'…I'm learning some good stuff," he said.

Like Fladrich alluded to, learning is the name of the game, especially when the clientele are relatively inexperienced drivers.

"Here are 13 kids we're touching today who will be better drivers as a result," he said. "With the repeated exposure to the exercises we teach them, their skills improve so drastically. They are three times better after the class than when they started."

For more information on the Collision Avoidance Training Program offered by the Dunwoody Police Department, contact Lt. William Hegwood at 678-382-6904.

The Collision Avoidance Training program is a 12 hour advanced car control program for teen drivers that has proven to be effective reducing crashes, injuries and deaths involving teen drivers.  This program is endorsed and recommended by law enforcement agencies. For more information contact your local police department or call  1-800-656-6507   or go to our website:   http://www.nationaltrafficsafetyacademy.com

New CDC Study Finds Annual Cost of Motor Vehicle Crashes Exceeds $99 Billion

In a one-year period, the cost of medical care and productivity losses associated with injuries from motor vehicle crashes exceeded $99 billion - with the cost of direct medical care accounting for $17 billion, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total annual cost amounts to nearly $500 for each licensed driver in the United States, said the study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention.

The one-year costs of fatal and non-fatal crash-related injuries totaled $70 billion (71 percent of total costs) for people riding in motor vehicles, such as cars and light trucks, $12 billion for motorcyclists, $10 billion for pedestrians, and $5 billion for bicyclists, the study said. See the CDC press release