Students Using High School Parking Lot Are Becoming Accident Prone Thursday, January 21, 2010 By Dan Sunderland [ArticleImageHyperLink] Advertising If you thought there were more than the usual number of collisions in the student parking lot last semester, you were right. Since the start of school in September, there have been at least three multiple-car collisions in the parking lot reserved for students at Middlebury Union High School. Although that may not seem like a lot at first glance, consider that the high school started the year with an enrollment of 666 students, and there are about 150 parking spots in the student lot. Assuming the same drivers filled the lot every day, three two-vehicle crashes would mean that roughly one of every 25 student drivers was involved in a school parking lot collision in the first months of school. School Resource Officer Scott Fisher, a member of the Middlebury Police Department, said other years have been worse than this one, in terms of parking lot collisions. Adolescent drivers are at greater risk of accidents than other motorists. A May, 2009, Indiana study, for example, found that adolescent drivers make up 6 percent of all licensed drivers in that state, yet accounted for 17 percent of drivers involved in collisions. “Research consistently demonstrates that younger drivers have substantially higher collision rates—and thus, greater risk of injury or death—than older drivers,” the study said. “Inexperience, inadequate driving skills, greater propensity for risk-taking, driving while impaired, and in-vehicle driver distractions put young drivers at greater risk for involvement in collisions.” None of the high school accidents involved impaired drivers. Senior Rebecca Bushey was driving a car involved in one of the first-semester parking lot accidents. She said she was “going home to see my mommy” at lunch when another student backed out of his parking space at what she described as an excessive rate of speed and struck the side of her car. The other driver could not be reached for comment. The damage to Bushey’s car was so extensive that the insurer decided to reimburse her for the current value of the car, rather than pay for repairs. The insurance check was “not enough to buy another car of equal value,” Bushey said. She said she feels “cheated” by the experience. All of the first-semester collisions involved one or more drivers backing out of a parking space. In the drivers’ education class at the high school, all students are taught to park so they are facing forward when they are ready to drive away. “Accidents such as those that have occurred recently in the high school parking lot are completely avoidable,” said Jim Calder, the high school’s driver education teacher. If students parked the way he instructs them, he said, they would not be backing out of parking spaces at all. Calder teaches students to back into perpendicular parking spaces so their vehicles come to rest with the front facing the center of the lot. That way, he said, a motorist pulling out of a parking spot has no need to back up. “The perpendicular back-in procedure is taught to all students at Middlebury Union High School, and is the safest way to park and un-park in perpendicular parking lots,” Calder said. Even if a driver chooses to park without backing into the space, parking lot fender-benders are avoidable, he said. “You must be looking both left and right at all times, scanning left and right as you’re looking backwards,” Calder said. The high school’s student handbook requires student drivers to register their vehicles with the school and to observe the campus’ 10 m.p.h. speed limit. “Poor automotive judgment results in loss of driving privileges,” the handbook says. None of the drivers involved in the first-semester collisions has been stripped of those privileges.

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