Parents, warn your teen drivers: The ’100 deadliest days’ have just started, cops say

The 100 days after Memorial Day are the deadliest days for teen drivers across the nation, according to Kansas Highway Patrol Trooper Ben Gardner.

During those days — dubbed the “100 deadliest days for teen drivers” — an average of 10 teenagers per day will die in crashes, Gardner said in a video posted to Twitter. That means about 1,000 teen drivers could die during these summer months.

That’s a “14 percent increase (in teen deaths) compared to the rest of the year, according to data analyzed by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety,” AAA said in a 2018 news release.

“There’s a lot of contributing factors to that,” Gardner said. “You think of just a lot of teenagers being in the vehicle at the same time contributing to inattention and how they’re driving that vehicle. That is a contributing factor.

“Driving at night is something maybe not as typical, but during the summer time they’re driving in hours different than what they’ve experienced through the school year,” he continued. “They don’t have to be back home in bed ... so you might see them driving around past 9 p.m.”

Speed is another contributing factor in the deaths, he said.

“So for parents, being aware of this, decreasing those opportunities for something bad to take place and speaking out loud about the concerns and the talking points of being a good driver is very, very important,” Gardner said. “That’s what I’m doing in my house ‘cause I have a teen driver.”

This story was originally published May 28, 2019 at 3:11 PM with the headline "Parents, warn your teen drivers: The ’100 deadliest days’ have just started, cops say."