Good Morning America visits Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

When you have an opportunity like this to celebrate the really quality research that our incredible researchers are doing here in Blacksburg at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in a more public forum like Good Morning America, there are few things that could be more thrilling. Having Good Morning America here today was a great opportunity for the Sharing The Road program. Because it's important that not only driver's education students, but the general population who already may be driving, understands how to safely drive around these trucks and stay out of the no zones. The no zones are really important because if you are hanging out in one of those no zone areas that truck driver is not going to be able to see you driving there. Most people don't understand the size of blind spots that these truck drivers have to deal with on an everyday basis. For instance, that rear blind spot can go 200 ft behind the trailer where the truck driver may not be able to see. Or how big that passenger side blind spot area is that's three lanes wide and is the biggest and most dangerous. Our whole hope with this program is just to raise awareness about how people can safely drive around trucks. And GMA really gives us a great pedestal to help reach a larger audience. We've started with visiting five schools and we're up to this school year going to be visiting close to 90 schools. And we're across four states in the Mid-Atlantic region, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and we're also in West Virginia currently. In fact, over just the last four years there's been 15,000 students who are now more educated about how to drive safely around these large vehicles. These are messages that only work if we can get them out to a broad group of the real general public and with Good Morning America's reach, we can get our important safety messages out to a lot of people at this time of the year when we've got a lot of holiday traffic coming up.