A traffic safety group gave Georgia a mixed grade in a report card released Thursday.
Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety – an alliance of safety, health and consumer groups and insurance companies – graded the traffic safety laws of all 50 states. It gauged the strength of the laws in various categories, including occupant protection, child passenger safety, teen driving, impaired driving and distracted driving. And it gave each state an overall grade – “green” for states that have made significant progress toward all the group’s recommendations, “yellow” for “needs improvement” and red for “falls dangerously behind” in adopting the recommended safety laws.
Georgia and 30 other states got an overall score of "needs improvement." Among other things, the group dinged Georgia for failing to require adults in the back seat to buckle up. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey shows 90 percent of registered voters in Georgia support requiring everyone in a vehicle to buckle up.
The safety group also recommends Georgia adopt several graduated driver's license requirements for teenagers, require rear-facing car seats for children through age 2, require ignition interlock devices for everyone convicted of drunk driving and prohibit teenagers from using cellular devices while driving except in an emergency.
Only seven states and the District of Columbia got the group's highest ranking. You can read the report here.
