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In the driver's seat

Teenagers as front-seat passengers affects the driver in strange ways, finds a study

IN THE HOT SEAT Focused driving

The roadways might be a lot safer if there were fewer teenage boys in, yes, the passenger seat.

That is the message of a new study suggesting that when a teenage boy is the front-seat passenger, a teenage driver, whether boy or girl, becomes more careless. The study appears online in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention. The study, by researchers from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, also found that when a teenage boy was driving and a teenage girl was in the passenger seat, he drove more safely. If a girl was driving with another girl as a passenger, she tended to be a bit less careful than a girl driving alone. The researchers came to their conclusions after sending monitors to look at the driving performances of students as they left 10 high schools in the Washington area. One group of monitors noted who was in the cars as the teenagers left the schools. Another group, a short distance away, used equipment to calculate speed and whether the students were tailgating, the two measures used in the study to assess driving safety. Most of the students tended to drive a bit faster than the general traffic and to leave less room between their car and the car in front. But it was worst when a boy was driving and another boy was in the front passenger seat. In that situation, the drivers tended to go 15 miles per hour faster than the speed limit. The lead author of the study, Bruce Simons-Morton, chief of the agency's Prevention Research Branch, said it was unclear how passengers were affecting drivers.

NewYorkTimes

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