Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
- Utah troopers visit rural high schools to promote road safety before 100 Deadliest Days.
- Teen drivers are a key focus due to high crash rates.
- Troopers emphasize basics: Buckle up, avoid distractions and obey speed limits.
RICHFIELD — Just two weeks before the start of the 100 Deadliest Days on Utah roads, troopers were busy at schools in central Utah sharing a safety message to a key demographic: teen drivers.
Utah Highway Patrol considers the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day the deadliest because its statistics show more people are killed on Utah roadways during that time than during the remaining 265 days of the year.
UHP Lt. Jason Kelsey said all too often, teen drivers are at the center of crashes this time of year, especially in rural areas.
"The two-hour block of time in a calendar day that contains the highest number of crashes is 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.," Kelsey said of the UHP region he oversees, which includes Sevier, Sanpete, Wayne, Garfield and Piute counties.
"It directly correlates to school letting out," he said.
Kelsey said troopers were visiting all 11 high schools in those counties this week in hopes of urging teen drivers to focus on the basics.
"Do the small things — buckle up, put your phone down and obey the speed limit," Kelsey said. "We're trying to connect with student leadership and kind of have a peer-to-peer connection with the students to get them to be more conscious about traffic safety."
At Richfield High School on Monday morning, Kelsey told students at an assembly troopers would be watching — especially over the next week.
"Between now and Saturday night, there's going to be 75 extra hours of state troopers working to issue citations for distracted driving and seat belts," he told the crowd.
Student body president Dylan Barclay acknowledged there were some important lessons for his classmates to take home.
"In a rural town, I think speeding is a pretty big issue," he told KSL-TV. "Just seeing other people speeding and kind of recklessly drive — it's a little bit scary to me."
He hoped students would do what UHP urged.
"If we can see that and fix it a little bit, the impact will be very large," Barclay said.
