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Show National Safety Council Driving Week in April Salt Lake City, April 7 thru 14 will mark the kickoff for the National Safety Council's second annual National Defensive Defen-sive Driving Week. This week will be designed to remind the American driver that traffic safety begins at home. "A safer America demands de-mands that every driver learn Defensive Driving," says Howard How-ard Pyle, president of the National Na-tional Safety Council and Fred Montmorency, president of the Utah Safety Council. "The American driver," Pyle and Montmorency noted, "drives "driv-es the safest cars and travels on the best, safety-designed roads in the world. But many lack skill in using them safely. 85 per cent of all accidents are still attributable to driver error, er-ror, and these errors account for over 56,000 deaths annually plus two million disabling injuries in-juries and billions of dollars in property damage." "Most driving errors can be traced to the lack of training," the Safety Council spokesmen added, "and the majority of the 116 million drivers on our roads today have not learned accident avoidance skills." The goal of the 1973 nationwide nation-wide Defensive Driving campaign cam-paign is to bring driver training train-ing to enough drivers fast enough to curb the rising death and injury toll. The National Safety Council would like to train three million drivers each year until the end of the decade of the 1970's. Thus far, more than four million American drivers dri-vers have taken the eight-hour Defensive Driving Course. The course is being taught all over the nation under the sponsorship sponsor-ship of state and local Safety Councils, industry, the armed services, churches and service groups. Volunteer instructors, whose training is also approved by the National Safety Council, present the course in four two-hour two-hour sessions. DDC utilizes films and visual aids. In these sessions, licensed adult drivers learn how to try to make every ev-ery automobile trip safely de- spite the poor driving habits and mistakes of other drivers and in spite of adverse driving conditions. A recent indepth research project showed that licensed motorists who completed the National Safety Council's 8-hour 8-hour Defensive Driving Course had fewer traffic accidents and violations than other drivers. These are the basic results of an extensive study conducted by the Council's Research Department De-partment involving more than 8,000 Defensive Driving Course graduates from 88 cooperating agencies in 26 states. The major finding reported in the study was that self-reported accidents among DDC graduates were reduced by nearly one-third in the year following completion of the course, while moving violations were cut by one-fourth. Other results showed drivers who completed DDC to have reduced reduc-ed some types of collisions by 40 percent or more and to have increased markedly their use of safety belts. |