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Initiative encourages teens to take lead in highway safety

Brent Jennings, PE
Highway Safety Manager
I would like to take a moment and talk about teen power in the world of highway safety. The Teen Road Safety Advocates™ (TeenRSA) Program is a national initiative that is aimed at empowering youth to take a leadership role in improving roadway safety. It is designed for high school students that want to be engaged in significantly reducing deaths and serious injuries on our roadways, but most particularly those that may occur in the area where they live and go to school.

The program also brings focus to an aspect of safety that many students do not always think of – the roadway. In this way, it complements and builds on other road safety programs that emphasize appropriate driver behavior and engages teens in the science of transportation engineering and roadway driving behavior.

The TeenRSA Program is built around a “Teen Roadway Safety Assessment” in which an “on-the-ground” review is conducted by a youth-led team at a section of roadway or intersection near the student’s school or in their community. This may be a roadway location where the students believe there is a problem, or one they want to evaluate to see if improvements could be made. As part of this program, a handbook has been developed that prompts the students to look at different roadway features and record their observations.

Through this process, students not only learn more about the roadway environment, but also about how drivers and other road users behave in those areas. Based on their observations, the students collectively identify potential problems and develop their ideas for improvements. Finally, the teams are encouraged to take an active role in sharing their findings and advocating for improvements.

A key to the success of this program is building a partnership with local transportation professionals and school officials. To assure this happens, the program envisions that every TeenRSA team will have two advisors, one representing each of these groups. The role of the advisors is to not only help point the students to additional resources or information, but also provide a link to others in the community.

If your community would like to know more about the TeenRSA program, please contact me and our office will be pleased to discuss this further. Youth play a critical role in highway safety and ultimately in changing the highway safety culture as we all continue on our way Towards Zero Deaths in Idaho.