YOUNG PEOPLE REV UP DANGERS OF DRIVING

What you don't know won't hurt you - unless you're on Georgia roads.
A new report on young drivers is shedding light on what goes on
behind some of those windshields whizzing by.

According to results released by the Joshua Brown Foundation, 6.6
percent of about 900 Georgia drivers, mostly teenagers, said in
questionnaires that they always or often took illegal drugs before
getting behind the wheel. It's more than the number that said they
regularly drank and drove.

"That's truly frightening," said Pat Wilder, director of the
foundation, which is named after a teenager who died after losing
control of the car he was driving.

There were other distractions and dangerous behaviors, too. More than
40 percent said they sometimes, often or always raced or sped
aggressively, and about half said they joked around or drove
aggressively. Well over half said they used cellphones and ate while
driving.

It may be frightening, but it's no surprise, said a handful of young
people interviewed last week in metro Atlanta. Dennis Sutton, 21,
said teenagers might take dangers seriously, "but once you get your
friends in the car, it's a whole other situation."

His friend Anthony Fernandez, 20, agreed. He said when he started
driving at 16 he knew drinking and driving was dangerous, but he only
took it seriously after doing it and seeing he couldn't control his
car. Fortunately, he didn't crash while drunk, he said. But he did
crash three times in his first year of driving, he added. Not since.

"In all actuality, experience is going to really do it," Fernandez
said. He said no classes, awareness campaigns or laws could make kids
drive safely until they felt the dangers personally and were
financially responsible for the damage. "Kids are funny. They say,
'Oh Mom, I don't do that.' But their peers have more power."

The study results don't claim to represent Georgia teens overall,
just the assertions by about 900 mostly teenage subjects who were
questioned about their own driving, their peers' and their adult
drivers. They were in four Georgia high schools and some commercial
driver's education programs; some were in National Safety Council
defensive driving classes, many of whose students are there by court
order. Results from a youth detention facility weren't used in this
study but will be used later.

Wilder and Dr. Carol Pierannunzi, director of the A.L. Burruss
Institute of Public Service at Kennesaw State University, who worked
on the study, said the scientists hoped its results could be used to
shift driver's education toward experiencing realistic situations -
not just rote understanding of the rules - and to highlight the role
that attitude and personality play in driving. The foundation has set
up a classroom at Cartersville High with computer driving simulators,
and Wilder said it hoped to develop a more elaborate simulator.

"It's that risk-taking personality," Pierannunzi said. "If they're
willing to do drugs, they're not going to have any second thoughts
about doing that and driving a car."

As striking as the figures are on the students' driving, she added,
they are probably low, because polled people in general tend to
underestimate their own bad behavior. While 19.6 percent of the
students said they often or always used a cellphone while driving,
they said 29.8 percent of their friends and 29.5 percent of the
adults they rode with did. Wilder said the adult statistics also
showed that kids are learning the behavior they observe in their
parents. She added that they even see their peers as more
law-abiding role models than adults.

Bob Dallas, director of the Governor's Office of Highway Safety,
agreed that kids learn what they see. "When do our kids learn to
drive? As soon as you take them out of the hospital and put them in
the car seat," he said. He also praised the changes to Georgia law in
1997 that helped the fatal crash rate involving 16-year-old drivers
fall 37 percent. That law gave new drivers their independence
gradually, placing restrictions on driving at night and having
passengers in the vehicle.

Michelle Fontaine, 19, said real-world education helped her. She took
a two-day course where students drove in a big parking lot and
learned firsthand how to deal with dangerous driving situations.
Shortly afterward she found herself making a turn too fast near the
Mall of Georgia, she said, quashed her instinct to just slam on the
brakes, and managed to control the car.

"It's saved my life in some situations," said Fontaine, whose aunt
works at the state Department of Transportation.

When it comes to taking drugs and driving, Fontaine, a photography
student, said she never would, but she knows others do, maybe
thinking that police can't detect drug use if there's no
paraphernalia in the car.

"I actually hear a lot of kids [say] like, 'I drive better when I'm
high, it makes me more calm.' " She said trying to explain they're
wrong is "just a waste of breath."