Street Survival Course Teaches Teens Control and Discipline Parents

The importance of driving education for adolescents is emphasized in messages to the point of numbing society. “Of course, children are important. Of course, driving is hard,” the older generations retort in unison. But actions rarely confirm this assertion.

We recently covered both the horrific human toll of driving errors and the safest and best cars for teens in this dangerous summer driving season.

An architect from Louisville, Kentucky, with a 16-year-old daughter, felt a crush and gave up his career as an architect for a vocation more than 20 years ago. Bill Wade hasn't looked back.

Wade began running the nonprofit Street Survival in 2003, organizing six days of dirt track driving classes and lessons for teens. BMW car clubs have been running track schools for years, Wade told the AJC and 95.5 WSB.

Tire retailer Tire Rack joined Street Survival as a major sponsor three years later. The day school network expanded to 100 schools nationwide in 2019, before the 2020 pandemic shut it down. Today, Wade, with the help of two part-time employees and more than 2,000 volunteers from several dozen car clubs, has helped bring the network back to 80 track days this year.

He said these clubs, along with chapters of the Sports Car Club of America and Porsche car clubs, help found and staff these schools with volunteers.

A local chapter of the SCCA is helping bring Street Survival to Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton on Saturday, Aug. 10, and Wade said 28 of the 30 spots were filled. But Metro Atlanta only has one class. Birmingham's Barber Motorsports Park has four, so Wade says he thinks there's incredible room for growth.

The Georgia-Alabama rivalry is not dead. Georgia needs more students interested in piloting their Ramblin' Wrecks (bad metaphor, yes). Alabamans seem much more concerned about their tides running smoothly.

“We're 'creating' 10,000 16-year-olds every day,” Wade said of the birth rate. But many parents have shown far more commitment in getting their children involved in their sports and team activities than in taking a Saturday off to arm their children with driving knowledge. Woodrow Gaines, founder of the Teen Vehicle Operations Course, has been echoing this to me for years.

“Elite-level sports like that in eighth grade — by the time they're their senior year of high school, (some students have done it) have had over 10,000 hours of practice and training,” said Wade. “You now get a driving license with 50 hours of training. »

Besides, “few kids die on a football field because of what another kid did to it, or a drunk driver, or the weather or anything like that,” Wade campaigned . But then he adopted an optimistic tone. Wade said he has 50 pages in a computer document filled with testimonies from former students about how Street Survival later served them. “I never had that as an architect.”

Wade answered the deeply spiritual question: “What breaks your heart?” This should.

The Street Survival website states that 50% of teen fatalities involve single vehicles, and 20% of all passenger automobile fatalities involve young adults behind the wheel. Drivers aged 16 to 19 are nearly three times more likely to die in a crash than those aged 20 and older. Driving is the leading cause of death among 15-20 year olds. These are not accidents.

Street Survival classes cost $125 per day. Wade said they charge money because they want parents and students to commit to showing up early one morning and dedicating a Saturday to it. They selectively provide financial assistance for this essential education.

Tire Rack got involved with the program because Street Survival's goal is car control, said Woody Rogers, Tire Rack's vice president of marketing. “It was the right program at the right time to connect with Tire Rack and the need to educate the world’s young drivers.” Rogers said Tire Rack's founders also saw the major pitfalls of standardized driver education: “Once you get a handle on your situation, you can handle virtually anything that comes your way as a driver , whether it's the mattress falling out of the truck, it's the drunk driver crossing the center line.

During a course day, the group of students is divided and one half attends a classroom session, while the other half goes to the cone parking lot for lessons on hard braking, the characteristics of anti-lock brakes, abrupt steering, appropriate acceleration and situational decision making. , and other maneuvers.

Wade and Rogers also stressed the importance of parents investing in tires appropriate for the vehicle they let their children use. They each said they were appalled when parents said, “Put the cheapest rubber on it, it’s just my kid’s car.”

Rogers said tread depth and air pressure are the two most important factors in tire maintenance. I've heard of the penny test for treads: if Abraham Lincoln's head is halfway above the tread, then it's legally safe for the road. But Rogers suggests that using a quarter is really what the safe tread depth should be.

So Rogers wants car owners to switch to George Washington.

If someone drives in the Georgia rain in the summer, they need better treads than an Arizona driver, Rogers said.

And proper air pressure is very important, Rogers said, because low pressure means vehicles have less control when carrying heavier loads. Rogers said that unless a freak case flattens a new tire, the tires, both in terms of brand and tread depth, should match on the same axle.

If parents want their children to be in control, the best place to start is where the rubber meets the road, Wade and Rogers said. Having tires in good condition – and properly trained drivers behind the wheel – allows them to handle unexpected debris, weather conditions or avoidance skills. Even if the driver is high level, he still has less track to avoid danger in the event of tire failure.

Tire Rack has a distribution center in Doraville, off Buford Highway, just north of I-285. It's fittingly diagonal to the busy, wreck-laden perimeter of Assembly Atlanta, the site of the former GM plant.

Driving requires a greater commitment, both behind the wheel and in maintenance, than almost everyone is willing to give these days. Given the heartbreaking statistics on teen driving and the recent increase in the death rate among all drivers, extreme proactive measures are necessary. Survival on the streets does not happen by chance.

Doug Turnbull, the PM Drive Skycopter anchor for Triple Team Traffic on 95.5 WSB, is the Gridlock Guy. Download the Triple Team Traffic Alerts app to automatically hear reports from the WSB Traffic Team when driving near hot spots. Contact him at [email protected].