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Effectiveness of Teenage Support System (TDSS) on Reducing Traffic Violation Behaviors for Teenage Drivers at the Early Time of Licensure

  • The TDSS alerted smartphone users about speed limits in areas where they were driving and issued warnings about risky behavior, in some cases also notifying parents.
  • The TDSS app posts the speed limit on the screen of a dash-mounted smartphone.
Status:  Complete
Report Date:  01/15/2021

Summary:

A longitudinal study funded by the Local Road Research Board found some long-term benefit for participants in an innovative MnDOT project conducted in 2015 that tracked and warned teen drivers of risky behavior using dash-mounted smartphones. The original study compared a control group of users who received no alerts on their phones to a second group of users who received text and audio alerts for speeding, aggressive turning and other risky behaviors, and a third group of teens who received warnings and notifications that their parents had been informed. Drivers in the two warned groups took fewer driving risks in their first year of driving. Five years later, researchers recruited 150 of the original participants and analyzed their driving records and responses to a survey that mirrored much of the survey from the original study. Drivers from the original study who had a lower incidence of risk-taking while driving had fewer driving citations later. Safety impacts were less clear. A new system based on the original Teen Driver Support System has been applied with success to a small group of senior drivers.

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