Tracking Teens with GPS Part 1
The first thing that comes to mind in this area is the question why would you want to track teenage drivers?
The first answer that comes to my mind is, to save their lives. It will only take one senseless death averted to make all my ramblings more than worthwhile. Is teenage death by auto a big problem? You bet. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 2 out of 5 teen deaths are auto related. That’s 40% if my rusty math serves me … and if we can make any significant reduction we’d be doing a lot. Not quite the same as curing cancer or world hunger, but worthwhile just the same. See some more eye-opening statistics here:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/teenmvh.htm
Now, can technology do anything with regard to these numbers, or is it just a fatalistic situation that every parent of a driving teen has to hope and pray they make it through? Well, I’m a recognized technique and I sell this technology for a living, so I may not be the most unbiased voice, but I also know the technology intimately and I’ve seen the faces when managers, business owners, USAF generals and many others first ’saw’ their drivers in their daily travels as they had never before seen them. I’ve also seen how driver’s performance changes when they know they are being monitored.
I was the project manager of an initiative to install a GPS tracking system on several hundred USAF vehicles. These vehicles weren’t just any old blue pickup trucks, they were driven by the premier forces of the US nuclear deterrent triad, the missile launchers and maintainers of those shiny white tubes of death deployed across the Northern Tier sates. These guys are investigated like no others, trained like no others, monitored like no others (they can’t even go to the dentist without an observer to make sure they don’t release classified informatiuon under the influence of Novocaine).
What happened the first week the system was in service? The commanding general could not believe the reports. Many of these guys were traveling as much as 30 miles per hour over the speed limit. After the first two weeks, fleet average speed dropped a full 20 miles per hour … no one was court martialed or taken out and hung, the troops (some who were only teenagers by the way .. average age of the drivers was 22), just found out the ‘old man’ had a way to look at them and they modified their behavior (and reduced their chances of dying … interesting analysis if that old saw “Speed Kills) here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/speedsci.html )
If you’re the ‘old man’ or ‘old lady’ of a teen age driver, this should give you some food for thought.
Speed kills, and you can’t manage what you can’t measure.