VTTI teaches high school students about "Sharing the Road"
"When you're getting ready to pass a truck, you want to make sure you have a clear lane in front of you." We're here visiting Blacksburg High School to teach teens how to share the road safely with large vehicles. "Can you see the mirrors ?" "No." We cover a lot of different strategies that all drivers can do, but especially teen drivers can do to avoid being involved in a heavy vehicle crash. The first strategy is don't hang in the no-zones. So all large trucks have four no zones. One is directly in front of the truck. The most dangerous no-zones on the right side of the truck. There's also a long no-zone back behind the truck, and then a small no-zone on the left side. They get up inside the driver's seat as a truck. And we asked them to look for objects are vehicles that we've placed around the truck to see if they can see them. "The pink bike in front of you ?" "No, I dont see it." The students get a good idea of where they should not be when they're driving their cars around a big truck. We've gone to over 120 schools and we've reached 13,000 students in the last five years. Just this school year alone, we're going to be visiting approximately 80 different schools. This program is an excellent example of research to practice. Over the past 30 years, we've done a lot of research on contributing factors to heavy vehicle crashes. And this program kind of puts those lessons learned to practice so that we can teach people what we know about these types of crashes and what causes them.
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute's Sharing the Road program shows students how to safely drive and share the road with semi-trucks through interactive and classroom-driven education.
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