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Just read the August Reader's Digest and it states that WY has 42.6% teen-driving fatalities per 100,000, which is the highest of any state. Montana came in 3rd with 40.2%. It also rates WY & MT as two of the states that do not have strict laws for licensing, seat belt usage and DUIs. It cites the data came from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Just curious, do any of you view teen driving incidents as common or the laws surrounding teen licensing as that lax in WY?
Although any teen death is a tragedy, I don't think it's a problem where I'm at. In Sheridan, we don't seem to have a great epidemic of teen deaths.
But when you think about it, it makes sense. Wyoming is probably one of the only places that when you leave one town, it's a hundred miles to the next town. Lot's of long distance driving with nothing to keep you occupied other then, hey look, another sage brush.
We have very harsh winters, high winds in a lot of places. Lots of challenges for new drivers. So yes, it makes sense.
We just got back from 2 weeks spent in Buffalo/Sheridan area and different areas of Montana. One thing that really struck me were all the billboards about meth use. Is it that rampant or is this a proactive strategy? If it is an issue, is it with the teens or the 20-30 somethings? I hate to link the meth issue with the driving issue without just cause but is there a correlation?
Not so obvious in the "statistical analysis" of the teen driving/accident rate is that youngsters in the country areas can start driving at 14 in Wyoming. That's an independent driving limited license, not a "learner's permit" where they need an older driver present to be driving.
The reason is the long distances around here and the "need" to travel to school activities, work, etc. Consider that there's a lot of months of bad roads due to weather and snow conditions that the kids are driving through, which makes for some pretty treacherous driving for drivers with little experience, minor accidents are not uncommon. Also, consider that many of these kids have been operating motor vehicles ... tractors and farm equipment ... since they were little. I've watched a neighbor use his three kids, now all high schoolers, as "helpers" to deliver hay/forage equipment to the area farm fields he leases. Imagine, if you will, a 12 year old moving a tractor with a large piece of field equipment down the country roads at 8-10 mph for as many as 20 miles ... and then repeating this for successive pieces of equipment and relocations through the planting or harvesting seasons. Driving Dad's pick-up or car to shuttle him back and forth becomes trivial in comparison.
While many of the neighbor kids I've seen around here are responsible drivers, there is still a segment that will go out and "joy ride" some of the local roads. For example, we have a (in)famous local stretch of a county road where it's rumored many cars will get airborne at speeds in excess of 65 mph (which is the prevailing "prudent" speed limit on the road) ... so the kids head out there and try to see if it's true. The local sheriff's deputies are forever busting kids driving there at 75 - 90 mph, which terminates the driving priviledge until they're 16, or later if they're older. Yes, the cars do get airborne, and yes ... there's been several fatalities on those couple miles of dirt road due to the excessive speed/loss of control.
RE: the "meth" billboard campaign. That's from a federally funded "drug awareness" program which is in all states. Wyoming chose to use some of the funds for the billboards. While I don't see meth problems around our area, I do hear from my deputy friends that there is a problem in the region with drug abuse ... but it's a relative issue. A "problem" here is a small fraction compared to larger cities with a "problem". You can get an idea of the relative size of the issue when you scan the daily "police blotter" section of the newspaper ... weeks can go by where most of the municipal arrests are alcohol related incidents, and the sheriff's dept and the highway patrol have only a couple or no arrests at all, or a "drug bust" on the Interstate with couriers. Even at that, the total number of arrests in the Cheyenne area, for example, wouldn't be considered a problem in most cities in the USA, but you could infer ... statiscally ... that Cheyenne has a big alcohol problem, as that's most of the arrests.
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Originally Posted by Dea13
..all the billboards about meth use. ..is this a proactive strategy? ... I hate to link the meth issue with the driving issue without just cause but is there a correlation?
meth billboards may be part of the Montana Meth Project, private funded and most effective in the nation I am not aware of a significant meth problem in WY, but I'm sure it is present there. Alcohol was the main issue when I was driving there many years ago.
WY Teen Driving death rate is largely a statistics (math / reporting) issue.
I would guess the overall fatality rate is high too.
Low overall population,
higher mileage per driver
Less number of folks commuting (as in no big cities with thousands of commuters)
Higher percentage of high mileage teen drivers (teens more apt to take off on a 100 mile 'non-essential' drive than the majority of retirees)
Higher average speeds
High percentage of 2 lane highways
Long distance between towns and the need to be on the road a lot all add up.
One of my co-drivers took out 3 teens one night when they crossed the centerline and ran head-on into a semi while coming home from the bar and 50 miles from nearest town (19 was legal drinking age at the time). It was over 3 hours before another car came by, and they were jammed under the cab of the truck. Quite a difficult night for my friend and several parents. State Raises Drinking Age - New York Times
We just got back from 2 weeks spent in Buffalo/Sheridan area and different areas of Montana. One thing that really struck me were all the billboards about meth use. Is it that rampant or is this a proactive strategy? If it is an issue, is it with the teens or the 20-30 somethings? I hate to link the meth issue with the driving issue without just cause but is there a correlation?
Thanks.
Dea
Unfortunately, meth is a problem. The billboards are a proactive measure and the police and county are very active in trying to take care of the problem. I worked in the jail for a time and out of 60 inmates only about 5 or 6 were in there for meth. So it's not real bad, but it's bad. Figure if there's 5 in jail for it, there's 50 who are not.
I raised 5 kids in this town and never had a problem. But they've seen friends succumb to meth.
I'd say that the meth problem really has nothing to do with teen deaths by accidents on the highways. Autopsy's are done and there's really nothing pointing at drug use. Mainly it's long driving times, lack of sleep and bad road conditions in the weather that claim our youth.
The last one I can remember was a kid that pulled out of his county road onto the highway in front of a pickup truck. Truck got him right in the drivers door. That kid had been pulling out of that road for years, just didn't see the pickup coming.
You should be VERY careful in reading anything from the "Insurance Institute for Highway Safety." They're a political front group for the insurance industry. They're not a research group. Their "research" (and calling it 'research' is giving it far too much credit) is designed to generate headlines and buffalo politicians into passing laws that reduce pay-outs by insurance companies, regardless of whether there is an actual decrease in injuries/deaths.
I've read the details inside some of their "studies" in the past and found very shoddy statistical methodology, errors of mathematics and just plain conflicts of their interests with common sense. They're well known for having advocated the shortening of yellow light periods at stop lights at the same time red light traffic cameras are installed, which leads to a surge in revenues for the companies that operate these cameras.
They've also been some of the prime advocates of reducing speeds on US highways, in their supposed quest to "increase safety." Well, if we accept their premise that 55MPH is a "safer" speed limit than 75MPH, then why not reduce the speed on US highways to 45MPH? That's safer yet. Then why not 30MPH? I got into this exact argument with one of their people in Nevada. They had no answer for me.
As others have indicated, the conditions in rural western driving are different than in many other areas of the US, and teenagers face challenges for new drivers that are unique to the rural west when they drive here. Some others not mentioned are high speeds on two-lane highways with little signage and challenging conditions, higher rates of heavy equipment and trucks sharing small roads with autos, etc.
In short, there is a whole host of issues for kids to deal with on rural western roads. And quite frankly (speaking as a former kid, who drove heavy equipment before he drove cars), most kids just seem to lack the spatial awareness that we adults have.
Example: Their brains haven't fully internalized space/time/speed relationships the way we adults have. Any of us adults here in the west would look at a car a mile away around the left side of a truck and know that we simply don't have time to pass a truck that is doing 65MPH in a 75MPH zone. If the other car is doing 75MPH, and we're going to be doing 75MPH, the closing speed is 150MPH, which means that a mile of distance between the other car and us is going to disappear in 24 seconds. Unless you're driving a real sports car (ie, a car that can accelerate like a bat out of hades), you simply don't have the acceleration necessary to pull this off. Adults just know this from experience, without doing the math - we don't even have to think about it. Kids don't have this experience, and most of them ain't going to do the math either - they see a car a mile away. It looks like it is so very far away...
One of the other statistical errors they make is in quoting rates of death per 100,000 population. Well, when we consider that Wyoming has only about 550,000 +/- people in total, there's obviously going to be a relatively small number of people out of that 550K who are teenagers, and an even smaller number who are new drivers. It takes only a few deaths in this small population cohort to plump up the statistics, which the insurance lobby then uses in a highly questionable comparison to a state like California, which has a far larger population.
We just got back from 2 weeks spent in Buffalo/Sheridan area and different areas of Montana. One thing that really struck me were all the billboards about meth use. Is it that rampant or is this a proactive strategy? If it is an issue, is it with the teens or the 20-30 somethings? I hate to link the meth issue with the driving issue without just cause but is there a correlation?
Thanks.
Dea
Meth use is a problem that started in the rural west and moved east, unlike most of the illegal drug problem that started in the more populated areas and then spread (eg, coke).
Meth is cheap (compared to other drugs) and the precursor ingredients for the "Nazi method" of making meth are easily available in rural farming areas (eg, anhydrous ammonia, used as a fertilizer on farms, is used in making meth).
Meth isn't so much a problem for driving imparement as it results in bizarre behavior by the abuser. Some chronic meth users become real basket cases, seeing things, hearing things, etc. It destroys people almost completely in about 18 months.
NVDave, some of the billboards were pretty gruesome to view. My 8yr old (who is very sheltered) thought they were for some horror movie. I explained it was to try to show people what happens when they do drugs and she looked shocked that anyone would do something that would make them look like that. Good to know it's not an epidemic.
Well... I dunno what to tell you. I've seen (and even worked) with some people who were meth-heads. I can't begin to describe to you how meth can grab hold of some people and never let go, because I've never done drugs like that. Beer and whisky are my pleasure.
The effects are pretty gruesome. The billboards aren't some cherry-picked cases just to shock you - ie, it isn't invented hysteria like we used to see in such propaganda movies like "Reefer Madness." Some people get hooked on meth and just take the escalator down, down, down, down... to depths that the rest of us cannot fathom. The billboards are just showing you the near-end state of these people... when they've been doing meth for, oh, two to three years.
On our farm in Nevada, every season I'd have "tweekers" (meth heads in the early stages) come up on our farm and ask for a job. This was the point in the progression where they're constantly "vibrating" -- their hands are shaking, their legs are bouncing up and down while they're talking to you... they just cannot stop moving. Their eyes are blown, pupils dialated, but they still have their teeth and some semblance of grooming and reasonable appearance. I guess we'd get three or four of these cases every year, from March to June (ie, beginning of the season). Some of them would be out of farming communities in Idaho, some out of other towns in Nevada, some out of California. One guy was even a nice young man from what I know is a rock-ribbed LDS town in Utah.
I felt really bad for them, but good judgement required that I not put someone in that state (because it is going to only get worse) into a machine that costs from $20K to $100K, and let them drive it all over our fields or on the county roads.
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I am not aware of a significant meth problem in WY, but I'm sure it is present there. Alcohol was the main issue when I was driving there many years ago.
Meth and the west
