| METRO NEWS | TODAY • September 24, 2000 |
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More Internet sites being geared to help parents keep tabs on young motorists
Joey Ledford - Staff
Sunday, September 24, 2000
As the teenage driving death toll continues its grim climb, Georgians are coming forward in an attempt to stem the carnage.
Karen Murakami, a Stone Mountain mother of a 16-year-old, has launched what she hopes will be a profitable national company called "Safe Kar --- Because it Takes a Village."
For $49.95 a year, you can enroll two cars in her program. The bumper sticker you will receive asks, "How's my driving?" It includes a toll-free number as well as the teen's identifying number so motorists can call and report bad teenage driving moves. Parents are given a password and can check Safe Kar's Web site for reports on their teen drivers.
"I wanted to feel good about doing something," Murakami said. "But we probably have more work . . . than I anticipated, just getting people educated."
You might remember a similar, though nonprofit, effort also based in Atlanta. Nancy Butler's DRIVSAFE, which offered a similar service for $25 a year, has morphed into a cooperative effort with Atlanta Traffic Court.
Young traffic offenders, she said, are being given applications for DRIVSAFE and told to sign up for a little added supervision.
"I had pretty much closed down, but I have re-established the toll-free number," said Butler, who now lives in Rockdale County. However, she added, "I haven't gotten any checks yet" from offenders.
Butler's two-year effort to appeal directly to parents to enlist the motoring public to keep an eye on teen drivers fell mainly on deaf ears, she said.
"My feeling is that they aren't interested in what their kids are doing," said Butler. "They ought to be wanting to take responsibility for their children."
Even though Butler predicted that Safe Kar, like similar "How's my teen driving?" efforts for profit, will fail, she praised Murakami for giving it a shot.
Murakami is trying to generate membership by using Safe Kar as a fund-raiser for schools. If school groups sell a membership, they get $10 of the proceeds.
"We really feel like going through the schools is the best way of getting the word out," she said.
Car crashes have been the leading cause of teen deaths since at least the 1960s. "How could we as a people not know that, (and) how could we have let it go this far?" she asked.
That's one reason Brian Luders, a Lawrenceville accountant, has set up a teen driving Web site and is determined to lobby state legislators to institute mandatory driver's education and toughen Georgia's teen driving law.
In place since 1997 and generally praised for reducing teen crashes, injuries and deaths, the graduated license law forces teens to hold a learner's permit for a year, grants a restricted license at 16 and gradually allows more freedom until an unrestricted license is issued at 18.
"We don't really have one," he said of a graduated license system, once you compare Georgia's to others across the nation. Some of those, he added, "put Georgia to shame."
Luders also advocates requiring teens and their parents to maintain a driving log documenting young motorists' supervised time behind the wheel.
Georgia also needs to institute an actual road test before licenses are awarded, he said. In most counties, drivers need only negotiate a few cones in a parking lot, which Luders calls "a crime."
"They ought to take them out and make them merge into traffic on I-85," he said. "The way it is now, when you only have to get the car up to 5 or 10 mph, it's not much of a test."
Luders said he plans to get a letter into the hands of every state legislator and every member of the local news media. "It will include a piece of glass from that accident in which four kids died" earlier this month in north Fulton County, he added.
Raising the driving age to 17, as some have advocated, is not the answer, said Luders.
"They're old enough," he said of 16-year-olds. "But they need to have the tools."
> ON THE WEB: For more information on Safe Kars: www.safekars.com
Brian Luders' teen driving Web site: www
.geocities.com/scared_ga/
> WHO TO CALL: For more information on DRIVSAFE, call 1-888-DRIVSAFE.
e-mail: [email protected]