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infocus:pc

An Accident Waiting to Happen?

Inexperience Makes Teen Drivers Vulnerable

By Lindsay Robison

It’s a known fact that the less experience someone has doing something, the worse that person will be when performing that task. No wonder we’ve all heard the cliché: “Practice makes perfect.”

So it goes with teenagers and driving: the less time they have behind the wheel, the more likely they are to get into accidents, which is probably why the percentage of 16-year olds killed in motor vehicles is higher than for older teenagers. Although numerous reasons can be attributed to why any particular teen becomes an accident victim, the simple fact of their inexperience makes them that much more vulnerable.

But state governments have taken notice of teenagers’ inexperience when it comes to driving. “Some states have actually raised the age that a teenager can get a license,” Carolyn Gorman, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute’s media office, says. “But it’s not happening all over the country. As a grandparent looking at a 14-year old who is about to get a drivers license, I would love it if he had to wait longer, but that’s only me.”

While not every state is making their teens wait to get their licenses in their oh-so-anxious hands, all 50 have implemented some sort of restriction on young drivers, many of them adopting graduated drivers licensing programs.

The most extensive GDL programs include: a minimum age of 15 and a half to be eligible for a learner’s permit; a three-month period driving with the learner’s permit under parental supervision before applying for an intermediate license; a minimum of 30 hours of supervised driving; a minimum age of 16 for obtaining an intermediate license; and a restriction for carrying passengers.

Florida acted first in implementing a GDL program in 1996; and, as of early 2007, 43 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted three-stage GDL systems – which include a learner’s stage, when all driving must be supervised; an intermediate stage, when unsupervised driving is allowed except under certain conditions such as driving at night or with passengers; and finally, fully unrestricted licensure.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the licensing laws in most states have been transformed,” says Anne McCartt, vice president of research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “They have changed dramatically, and that’s happened fairly rapidly over the last decade. What we’re seeing now, we’re just beginning to evaluate some of the effects of these laws.”

And these beginning effects seem to be positive. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that states with comprehensive GDL programs – five or more of the GDL elements in effect – experience a 20 percent reduction in fatal crashes involving 16-year-old drivers.

An article published in a 2007 issue of the IIHS’s Status Report also showed reductions in crashes among 16-, 17-, and 18-year-old drivers, and reported that the number of teens killed in automobile accidents in 2005 was the lowest in 13 years.

“In the study, we didn’t evaluate graduated licensing laws per se, but as we pointed out in the Status Report, we saw this really substantial drop in 16-year-olds’ crashes per population in both fatal and all severities of crashes,” McCartt says. “When we look specifically at the types of crashes that should be addressed by graduated licensing laws – nighttime crashes, fatal crashes, or crashes with passengers – they came down even more. We think this points to the effectiveness of graduated licensing.”

Although no one – of any age – can completely prevent an accident, it appears that for teenagers behind the wheel, practice at least makes better.