Jefferson students enjoy safe roads

Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.

Fifty-seven million kids in the United States daily walk, bike, take the bus or get a ride to school during the school year, a necessary journey that can sometimes turn dangerous, according to a newly-released study.
School children in Jefferson and Madison counties, however, are among the safest in the nation when it comes to the risk of a traffic injury or worst, according to the just-released School Safety Snapshot by Zendrive, a California-based company whose mission is to make roads safe through data and analytics. Jefferson and Madison's ratings, moreover, come despite Florida's poor overall ranking and drivers in general not improving their driving behavior.
When it comes to road safety, the study rated Jefferson County an A- and Madison County a B+, whereas Florida overall received an F, ranking 44 of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.
To come up with its conclusions, Zendrive's data scientists analyzed driver behavior around more than 125,000 elementary, middle and high schools around the country (representing 90-percent of all U.S. schools) and issued a traffic safety score for each school.
The methodology entailed looking at the number of trips that crossed through each school area and the number of events that occurred within each school area, then rating the safety based on the number of events within the school area per trip.
The more unsafe driving events that were documented per trip (such as hard braking, phone fiddling, etc.), the lower the grade the school received, with the state's score the aggregate of its counties' scores. Florida counties that received an F grade included Broward, Clay, Collier, Hamilton, Hilsborough, Leon, Marion, Miami-Dade and Santa Rosa.
Overall, a comparison by Zendrive of the 2018 and 2017 data showed no improvement in driver behavior around 90-percent of the country's schools. In fact, the study found that driver behavior worsened around 30 percent of the schools, with school location and street design contributing factors for the increased level of risky driving.
Not surprisingly, the study found that nationwide, schools in rural areas tended to have safer drivers than in cities. Schools near busy roads like arterials, state highways and interstates, however, were plagued by dangerous traffic, even in rural areas. Indeed, nine of the 10 schools with the most dangerous traffic in the country were school adjacent to heavily-travelled roads in rural areas.
Generally, however, the study found that cities, given their density and higher competition for road space, saw more risky driver behavior than rural areas.
“Shockingly,” the report notes, “traffic crashes are the number one cause of injury death for school-aged children in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
“As parents, caregivers and members of our school communities, we have the ability to make the trip to and from school safe,” said Jonathan Matus, Zendrive’s CEO and co-founder. “To prevent these crashes, injuries and fatalities, we need to prevent the driver behaviors that contribute to them, and to manage these behaviors, we need to measure them. With the School Safety Snapshot, Zendrive aims to empower communities to do this.”
The type of poor driver behavior that leads to dangerous traffic includes distracted driving, phone use while driving (including texting or emailing), speeding, rapid acceleration and hard braking.
The 2018 study looked at 10.5-billion-miles of data from around the United States, driven by 9.1-million anonymous drivers, who took 1-billion trips in April 2018. All told, data scientists looked at risky events that occurred within a quarter mile of 125,703 schools in 3,094 counties across the country and documented 4.6-billion unsafe driving events.
Zendrive represents itself as the world's largest, richest and fastest growing dataset of driving and driver behavior, with its driver behavior data said to be six-times more accurate at predicting collisions than the insurance industry’s standard methods. Zendrive’s technology is reportedly used by fleets, insurers and other road safety leader to measure and assess risk with the utmost precision and by cities to plan safer streets.