 This is great. Good morning. Thank you all for being here. My name is Dan Goodman for who don't know I'm the Public Affairs Manager for Triple 8 Northern New England and we're here to raise awareness for distracted driving. We're gonna start this great day out after following me, Secretary Flynn will say a few remarks and we'll give a fantastic award presentation to a high school student who made a fantastic distracted driving PSA. Then we'll hear from Gabe Kennell, Deputy Administrator from NHTSA. At the end of the walk, I welcome everyone here to join us on the walk to end distracted driving. We'll enter at the end of the marketplace and go around the block and back down Church Street. Then we will come down here and we have all these great interactive activities from all of our partners, traffic safety partners from AT&T and local motion from on Highway Safety Alliance. The rollover please join us. I really want to give a special thank you to a few individuals who made this happen right in front of me, Evelyn McFarlane from AOT, Barb Brody, Meredith Dolan, the newest member to our Vermont Highway Safety Alliance, our NHTSA partners, all of our Vermont Highway Safety Alliance partners who couldn't do this without you as well as all the law enforcement who are here today who keep our roads safe. Thank you very much. At Triple A we have a distracted driving initiative to make distracted driving as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving. We call it Don't Drive Intoxicated. The campaign targets adult drivers who would never consider drinking and driving but don't think twice about picking up their smartphone to text, to email or using ways to distract their driving and cause our roads to be unsafe. An average of nine lives are lost every day to distracted driving and most experts think that is way under reported. There is smartphone technology to prevent distracted driving but most drivers don't know about it. A new Triple A survey found that 81% of drivers across the country are aware that their phones have this feature which restrict calls and texts while driving but over half of drivers have never used that feature. This feature can prevent crashes, injuries, fatalities on our Vermont roads. We ask everyone who drives intoxicated to get your passengers, consider the lives of other drivers, keep pedestrians and cyclists in mind and remember your own life. When you drive intoxicated, you needlessly put everyone on the road in danger, including yourself. Be a good role model for your children, your friends and others. Don't drive intoxicated. Don't drive intoxicated. Put your phone down. Lives depend on it. Thank you very much. Secretary Flynn. Good morning everybody. Thank you all for coming out this morning and a special thank you to the student here today for participating in Vermont distracted driving awareness day. Today is a day to amplify traffic safety messaging to the public. I'd like to take a second to offer a special thank you to Dan Goodman of Triple A New England and his entire team and also the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance. And I would add also tremendous team here from the Agency of Transportation who also helped put this together. You all helped organize this event and bringing Vermont's Highway Safety Advocates together today on the Church Street Marketplace to promote highway safety. Raising awareness for distracted driving is an important year round, but it is especially important in the summertime. During summer months, most serious crashes peak in Vermont. Graduations, vacations and summer travel are now upon us. It is imperative to focus on the road and be aware of pedestrians, motorcycles, bicycles, and of course other vehicles, all who share the road. Current figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicate distracted driving claimed 3,522 lives nationwide in 2021 with an additional 362,415 people injured in motor vehicle traffic crashes, all caused by distracted driving. In the state of Vermont between 2016 and 2022, 59 fatalities have occurred from crashes caused by distracted driving. And in that same time in the state of Vermont, 403 people sustained serious bodily injuries from crashes caused by distracted drivers. Families, friends and communities have been forever changed because of these losses. Our goal today is to ask all drivers to be engaged drivers and give driving your full attention. We're also here this morning to recognize and to award Vermont High School students for their creative work, producing a public safety announcement on the dangers of distracted driving. As part of the fifth annual video contest, hashtag safe drives saves lives Vermont, which is sponsored by the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance. Students were asked to produce a 25 second video about distracted driving for a chance to win prizes and obviously the recognition. It is important for our new drivers to be ambassadors for safety. They are the best at producing and sharing messages that are relatable to their peers. As in past years, there have been many powerful persuasive submissions. So please join me in thanking these students for their hard work, their creativity and their passion for this topic. Thank you all very much. Everyone, my name is Meredith Dolan. I'm the new executive director for the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance. Thanks so much for coming out today. I want to start by thanking the 39 students from across 13 schools in Vermont who participated in this year's PSA contest. This year marks our fifth annual contest and to highlight the dangers of distracted driving. We were again amazed by the creativity shown by the students and the talent that they demonstrated in creating these very important videos. We're especially pleased to see the perspective of young drivers reflected in these videos who bring new viewpoints to the topic of highway safety. Finding new ways to communicate this message and the dangers of distracted driving to the public is so important. These videos will help the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance deliver this message and will support increased safety on our roads and highways. First, I want to take a moment to thank the judges who helped us start through these videos. We have high school student Sam Scott, UVM medical student Stephanie Geiger, Bryan Agrin of Henhouse Media and Chief Jennifer Frank of the Windsor Vermont Police Department. Based on the judges scores, 12 videos were selected as finalists and of those seven were just going to receive an honorable mention. So I want to read those names off today and thank those students for participating and congratulate them for being finalists. Those are Thomas Noble, Sam Umphlett, Jack Thurber, Joshua Santway, Amelia Gordon, Emma Blow, and Max Petrosi. And next we're going to recognize the five top winners and we're going to be joined by the contest sponsors. We had four additional contest sponsors who are going to read off the names of the students who won their particular awards. Those sponsors were the Cooperative Insurance, AT&T, Yankee Driving School, and the Vermont Driver and Traffic Safety Association. The first award I'm going to announce actually is being awarded by the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance. We selected Leo Musso to receive our award. Leo's video is incredibly moving and it truly makes you think about the consequences of distracted driving. Leo was unable to be here today but I'd like to offer him a round of applause for his good work. Herbert Brody from the Vermont Driver and Traffic Safety Association announced their winner. Thank you and thank you all for being here. On behalf of the Vermont Driver and Traffic Safety Education Association and the Driver Education Teachers we would like to present its sponsors choice award to Cooper Niles. Cooper Cooper's video demonstrates how quickly a driver can lose control when they are paying attention to their phone and not the road. Cooper lives in Bennington so he was unable to come up here but we will be sending his award to him. Thank you very much. We're from Gabrielle Inetsch from Yankee Driving School. The Yankee Driving School is pleased to award the sponsors choice award to Devin Hogan. Devin's video is a great reminder that a split second of inattention can share your world and that it's just not worth it. Devin was also not able to be here today so if we could offer him a round of a plus that would be great. And now we'll hear from Ryan Clark from AT&T. Good morning everybody. AT&T is pleased to award its sponsors choice award to Lincoln Hurley. Lincoln's video reminds us that our family and friends would rather we arrive late than not at all. To ensure we arrive safely we need to pay attention to the road and not our phones. Unfortunately also Lincoln was not able to join us but let's please offer a round for his great video. Our last award today is the Cooperative Assurance People's Choice Award. That award video garnered the most online votes and this year's the People's Choice winner is Ryan Bevins. Ryan's video encourages us to heed the warnings to not text and drive and shows that ignoring those warnings could have very dire consequences. Congratulations Ryan and come on up. So this award is to Ryan Bevins People's Choice Award video submission of the hashtag Safe Drives Saves Lives Video Contest May 13th 2023 Congratulations Ryan. This is a check for $500 for Ryan. Congratulations Ryan. We would now like to invite Gabriel Cano to say a few words. Gabe is the current Deputy Regional Administrator from the United States Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Boston. Gabe has over 30 years of experience working to address mental health, environmental health, environmental justice, and traffic safety issues within diverse communities across the country. Please welcome him. Buenos dias. Thank you very much. Secretary you took all my talking points so I'm not going to repeat those. I want to thank Ryan because that's the point of this. We need to get this message of how not to be distracted and Ryan is an example of how Vermont does it right. I see the stats all around the country every day. Vermont is doing something right and this is an example. So, Secretary, thank you very much. Allison, Rachel, thank you for what you're doing because you're figuring out how to get this very difficult message because people are not paying attention. But here they are. So you're doing something right and congratulations. Thank you. Hi there. My name is Meredith Dolan. I'm the Executive Director for the Mont Highway Safety Alliance. We're here today for the Distracted Driving Awareness Safety Day. We're here to bring awareness to the dangers of distracted driving and hoping to reach out to people, meet people here on Church Street and give them some helpful information, some tips to avoid distracted driving and provide education about the dangers of it and just helpfully make people more aware when they're out on the roads. And I'm going to hand this over now to Barbara Brody to say a few more words. Hi, I'm Barbara Brody. I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Driver Education Traffic Safety Association. I represent the drive education teachers across the state. We have a curriculum that deals with distracted driving. It's a huge issue. It's an issue that we know our young people are doing often and we spend a lot of time having them understand what happens when you are looking at the phone or texting or your friends and not looking at the road. Hi, I'm Tom Baron with AAA Northern New England here in Burlington, Vermont, making people aware of distracted driving. Nine people every day on average are killed in the United States by a distracted driver and over a thousand are injured. So this awareness today of different Vermont traffic safety agencies here is very important so that we can give people the idea that they need to put their phone down. Don't drive distracted. Focus on your driving. That's most important. Thank you. So AAA has a driving program that talks about don't drive intoxicated, don't drive intoxicated, meaning we don't drive when we're impaired by alcohol. We should not drive while we're impaired by being into the phone. So what most people don't know is when there was a survey is that 81% of the responders to the survey were unaware that you can set your phone to do not disturb and only 54% of the responders did use them. We're advocating for people to use that do not disturb function on your phone while you're driving so that it doesn't distract you. We don't want people driving intoxicated and we don't want people driving intoxicated. We want people driving focused on the road doing the right stuff. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Corporal Lewis with the Chittenden County Sheriff's Office and this is Corporal Turner from the Chittenden County Sheriff's Office. We're here with Governor's Highway Safety and the Vermont Sheriff's Association to talk about highway safety and seatbelting. The vehicle you see in front of us is our rollover car which is used to demonstrate what happens in the event of a rollover situation to non-belted and belted individuals in the vehicle. What you're going to see here is watching it spin. There you see how the unbelted child in the rear was ejected from the vehicle. Obviously that would lead to severe injury if not death. However as you can see here the driver who is belted is securely in the vehicle and unharmed. So all of us in law enforcement in Vermont encourage seatbelt use. It is required particularly for children and drivers that you are required to wear one so please do. Safety depends upon it. Hi I'm Dustin Skillbred with Alliance Highway Safety. We work with highway safety offices all over the country including the Vermont Highway Safety Office just getting the message out and kind of educational outreach about safe driving. So we're out here today to promote awareness about the dangers of distracted driving in Vermont. You know 59 people have been killed from distracted driving over the years here in Vermont the last six years and so we're just out here really trying to interact with folks about safe driving behavior. We have a large inflatable cornhole set you see there with the message and the idea we have some fatal vision goggles they're called which are essentially drunk goggles that are made to simulate impairment at the legal limit so a range of about 0.07 to 0.10 the legal limit is 0.08 and so we have folks put on the fatal vision goggles and see just how difficult it is to even do something as simple as toss a beanbag into an inflatable cornhole set. We also have an impaired driving simulator here that runs off of virtual reality and an oculus gaming system so and that can simulate impaired alcohol driving drug impaired driving as well as drowsy driving and those are all all problems on the road here. We have a walk the line activity in front of the booth here as well where we'll have people put on those fatal vision goggles or the drunk goggles as people like to call them just to show them just how difficult that is just to even walk a straight line if you're impaired at the legal limit let alone driving a vehicle and a three thousand pound weapon at 55 miles an hour and then we just have a safe driving pledge here at the booth as well as some safe driving surveys just to raise raise awareness and see what see what people think about driving behaviors around the state and how we can help. So we're just out here today on a gorgeous day in Burlington just sharing the message about safe driving. Evelyn McFarlane and I work with the Vermont State Highway Safety Office and also work closely with the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance. This is we this is our fifth year that we have done a public safety announcement contest with Vermont high school students and one of our generous very generous sponsors is AT&T who sponsors every year one of the awards for our students. Great well thank you for the kind injure reduction my name is Ryan Clark with AT&T as as mentioned we've sponsored this great event for PSA contest for high school students for a number of years now you know we at AT&T have had a program called it can wait that is really designed around making sure our cell phone users are using their technology the right way when they're on the highway and it's all about keeping your phone down and in keeping your eyes on the road while you're driving and it's the most important thing that that we can we can provide our customers with is some ideas and some guidelines on what you can do and what you should be doing when you're driving and using our phones on the highway we've been proud to support this organization and many others about their driving safe campaigns and especially teaching high schoolers about a number of the dangers of driving and it's it's can happen so quickly when you're on the road driving 60 70 miles an hour you look down at your phone for just a few seconds you've already gone to full football field so it's important to keep your eye on the road while you're driving stay focused and never taking your eyes off the road because no text phone call email is worth your life or the lives of anybody else on the road so it's extremely important to stay focused while you're driving and that's what us at AT&T are really here to support and again supporting such great organizations that are here you know like the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance and others so we're proud to be here proud to support such a great mission with our it can wait program