This year Palouse RTPO hosted Driver Safety Awareness week the week of April 15th through April 21st.
So what is Driver Safety Awareness Week?
Driver Safety Awareness Week has been an event that we have been putting on for the last three years. Each April we set aside one week to take time to reach out to the local community and really spread awareness of what distracted driving is, and how it can effect us. Many people don't realize that their are three different types of distracted driving and that really distracted driving is as simple as ANYTHING that takes your mind, eyes, or hands off of the wheel. Every day we went out to a different school here in the Palouse to ask students to take the pledge to not drive distracted. Because we feel that each one of them can make an impact to our world and help reach are goal of zero fatalities from distracted driving.
Now some people may say that zero is an unrealistic number but isn't true that our own goal for each one of our own families is zero? So if that's true that shouldn't that goal be the same for our whole nation?
Monday, Wednesday and Thursday we visited Colfax, Clarkston,and Pullman High School and talked to so many different students about what it looks like to drive safe. We got a lot of responses from different high school students saying that they already practice driving safe or that their mom would kill them if they texted and drove. The issue is according to the Times "A new study surveyed 1,000 drivers and found that 98% of those who text everyday and drive frequently say the practice is dangerous. Still, nearly 75% say they do it anyway."
We also got a strong response from the driver simulator that we brought. Kids loved practicing their driving skills and even seeing what it would look like to drive under the influence by wearing a pair of our drunk goggles while playing the game. By creating simple tasks to try to accomplish while wearing the drunk goggles each high schooler really saw the effect that drugs and alcohol have to your senses and response time.
On Tuesday and Friday we visited both WSU and U of I. Our response was very positive a lot of different people stopped to make the pledge to not drive distracted including a police officer from Moscow, and many different students from different chapters of the Greek community.
The most shocking thing that we found while going to these events were the people that would listen to what we were doing and then tell us that they didn't feel like they could take the pledge because they knew that they would text and drive again.
Isn't your life,the life of a loved one or even a complete random stranger worth so much more than a text?
http://time.com/3561413/texting-driving-dangerous/
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