|[ Sarah found this article in health class on the bulletin board for me. LOLOL it fits Kurt perfectly.. ]|
Last August, at 11:15 on a Friday night in Jackson County, Missouri, a high school student with three teenage passengers lost control of his car while driving at 100mph. The car flew off the side of the road and hit a tree. Two of the teens died.
In Tallahassee, Florida, a teen passenger suffered a severe brain injury when the 16-year-old driver lost control on a rain-slick road at night and hit a tree.
Driving at night is risky business. According to the Insurance Institute dor Highway Safety, in 1999, 41 pecent of the teenage highway fatalities occurred between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. Even though less than 14 percent of the miles driven by teens occur at night, 39 percent of the fatal crashes happen at night. Why?
WHAT YOU CAN'T SEE
PROBLEM: Darkness. At night, you simply can't see as well as you can in the day. Night vision cells, the rod cells in the retina, take over from the cone cells that can see color. This hampers your ability to see details, especially to the sides, and to judge motion (cars or animals appear to move slower).
SOLUTION:
Trooper Rob Marone of the Colorado State Highway Patrol trains people to continually scan the road: Check the shoulder, sweep the roadway, look past your headlights. You may see a deer's eyes and can stop before you hit it.
Trooper Marone warns, however, not to outrun your headlights. Low-beam headlights let you see about 160 feet ahead. Let's say the deer is 160 feet ahead of you. Most people need about one and a half seconds to react to a danger (the time it takes your brain to tell your foot to step on the break). So, at 40 miles per hour, your car would travel 84 feet before you hit the break, and it would take another 100 feet to stop. That means you could hit the deer. Even with high beams wich allow you to see 350 feet ahead, you would outrun the lights at 60 miles per hour.
Important tip: Even if you're not out running your head lights, they can't alluminate around curves or up and down hills. (Slow down if the tail lights of a car in front of you disappear.) Slow down 25-30 percent from your day time speed. If you usually drive a stretch of road at 40 miles per hour during the day, for example, reduce your speed to 30 miles per hour at night.