Dear Readers: as some of you may have noticed, during the past six weeks I took some time away from regular posts on this blog. I wish I could say that I was relaxing on some beach or golf course, but I have been working on my book, His Father Still, and also doing some research for upcoming blog posts. Contrary to what some may think, these blogs do not write themselves, and some of the posts actually require some digging. The time has been productive. Upcoming on this blog is what will probably be a multi-part series about teens and distracted driving, including such topics as whether GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and on-board navigation systems are a help or a detriment to safety among teen drivers; the emerging cellphone apps that prevent texting while the car is in motion: hands-free texting (another emerging technology); and the next wave of dashboard mounted computers and other interactive electronics. (Now you see why I needed some time do research.)

In the meantime, I have one proud addition to the blog. A few weeks ago, my daughter Martha, who turned 18 in May (and lost her borther when she was 14), and I taped a half hour interview about safe teen driving for West Hartford Community Television. The program was sponsored by HopeWorks, a family counseling center in West Hartford. The link to the archived video is below. Martha (I have her permisson to post this and link the video) describes her own activities with regard to safe teen driving and gives her perspectives on why teens do and don’t take safe drivng seriously. I will apologize in advance for the moments on the video when I was beaming at my daughter with pride.

http://www.whctv.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1263:hopeworks-teen-driving-safety-may-2010&catid=65:hopeworks&Itemid=11

Best wishes for a safe and enjoyable summer.

Teen driver laws in most states contain a nighttime curfew.  In general, the deadline for teen drivers to be home ranges from 9:00 p.m. to midnight, with several exceptions, such as employment, school activities, medical needs, religious observances, and participation in volunteer public safety services (fire, ambulance, “safe rides,” etc.).

Some thoughts about curfews and managing them:

1. The most important point is that curfews do not address the most dangerous hours of the day for teen drivers, the one or two hours after school.  It is at those times that teens are most likely to be riding with illegal passengers, which substantially increases crash rates.  Thus, curfews address the second-most dangerous time, late-night driving.
2. As to late-night driving, of course, the biggest problem is teen drivers racing home to beat the curfew.  In fact, some teens think that getting off the road by the state’s deadline is a legitimate reason to drive at whatever speed is necessary to get home on time.
3. The curfew does not justify speeding, of course, but it does highlight the importance of parent-teen planning to ensure that teens will be off the road without speeding.  Doing so requires a discussion before the teen leaves of the route and the anticipated return-trip travel time.  Once these are established, parent and teen are better able to plan the return to comply with the curfew  (route + estimated travel = necessary departure time).  The departure should also build in a margin for traffic delay; if the route normally takes 30 minutes and the curfew is 11:00 p.m., then departure time should be 10:15 p.m.        
4. The teen driver should be clear that a delay such as a traffic backup that will result in missing the curfew needs to be reported to a parent or guardian as soon as it can be done safely, that is, not by texting or using a cell phone while driving, but by getting to a safe, off-road location at the earliest opportunity to explain the location and extent of the delay.  The teen should understand that delays first reported upon arrival at home will be thoroughly questioned.
5. If the parent and teen have executed a Teen Driving Contract (either the model on this blog or one of the other national models), the contract most likely identifies a penalty for missing a curfew.  As much as any other part of a Teen Driving Contract, this provision requires a parent’s judgment.  As we all know, predicting driving time can be an inexact science, and there will be times when teens will arrive late due to traffic conditions beyond their knowledge or control.  Recall that the purpose of a Contract is a mutual commitment to safety, not a punishment  for the slightest infraction.  My advice is that if the teen was diligent in leaving on time, provides a credible explanation for being a few minutes late, and is not a repeat offender, flexibility is appropriate.
6.  As for managing the exceptions stated in your state’s law, the first, simple rule is:  if the teen will be on the road after the state’s curfew on a regular basis, most likely for employment or a school activity, have the employer or a school official provide a letter, on letterhead, that the teen can keep in the glove box.  The letter should specify when the teen will be on the road, why, and the route.  An employer’s letter might say:  “To Whom It May Concern/Law Enforcement:  Kevin Jones is an employee of the 7-11 Store on Midland Avenue in Smithtown.  He works until midnight on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, after which he drives to his home at 123 Main Street, using Route 14.”  A school official’s might say:  “Mary Doe is involved in a theater production at Central High School from April 16 to May 4.  She will leave school Monday through Thursday night between 11:00 p.m. and midnight and drive to her home at 18 Elm Street, using the River Parkway.”
7. Teens need to understand the limits on using exceptions.  When I speak at high schools, I tell students, “If the curfew is 11:00 p.m. and its 11:15 p.m. because the game went into overtime, and the police stop you, but you are somewhere close to a direct line between school and your home, you’re not breaking the law.  But if it’s 2:00 a.m. and  you’re two towns away, you’re in trouble.”
8. Parents should bear in mind that a joyride with a curfew is still a joyride and therefore dangerous.  The fact that a teen may be ordered home from “recreational” driving (see “The Difference Between “Purposeful” and “Recreational” Driving”) by a certain time does not lessen the huge dangers of the joyride itself.
9. Finally, recognize that the night-time curfew in a state’s teen driver law is a maximum.  Use your judgment on a case-by-case basis.  Exercise your rights under your Teen Driving Contract.  If particular circumstances such as fatigue or bad weather counsel you to set an earlier curfew for a particular evening, by all means do so!  As with all other parts of teen driver laws, the state sets one curfew for all teens in all circumstances.  This does not mean that you, as a parent, park your judgment in the garage.

I was privileged last month to attend the Lifesavers Conference, the annual national meeting of the traffic safety community.  The meeting (this year, the 28th Annual) draws federal, state, and local public safety officials, law enforcement, hospital and emergency medical services, insurance companies, teachers, academics/researchers, and a few parents.  Herewith, information I gleaned that is of interest to parents of teen drivers:

1. The good news:  Even though there are more cars on the road and people are driving more miles than ever before, preliminary statistics show that there were fewer fatalities on American roads in 2009, just under 34,000, than in any year since 1954, and fatality rates for teens are down approximately 22 percent from 2005.  Stricter teen driver laws are working.
2. On the other hand, in this economy, cars are getting smaller, and occupants of smaller cars are at greater risk.  In addition, some caught in the economic downturn have figured that it’s less expensive to travel by motorcycle than car, and as a result, motorcycle accidents are increasing rapidly.  Motorcyclists are 35 times more likely to be injured than occupants of a car.
3. The big question for government officials and researchers about the recent progress in fatality rates is how much is attributable to stricter laws and enforcement, and how much results from large increases in the price of gas, and from the economic recession.  Simply put, millions of people are driving fewer miles because they cannot afford to do so.  Particularly, when economic times are tough, it’s recreational driving, as opposed to driving to work, school, or shopping (”purposeful” driving) , that declines.  More accidents occur in recreational driving.  The question thus becomes, if the economy improves, if the price of gas moderates, or even if car manufacturers introduce much more fuel efficient cars, will vehicle miles traveled increase again, and with them crashes?
4. For teen drivers, the experts seem to agree that the best combination for state teen driver laws is a long learner’s permit phase, both in terms of hours behind the wheel (more than 100) and length of time (6 to 12 months); licensing as late as possible (17 or older); and no night driving and no peer-group passengers for the first year of licensure.
5. At the Conference, one parenting expert laid out four styles of parenting:  uninvolved, permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative.  He explained that authoritative – firm rules, and parent oversight rooted in safety and awareness of danger, not power or control – is the goal.
6. One speaker suggested that teen drivers should have to ask for the car keys every time they get behind the wheel, even if they are the primary driver of the car.  This step builds in a filter, a pause button for parent and teen to review whether it is safe to drive at that particular moment, to review any portion of a teen driver contract that might be implicated at the moment, to establish a mutual understanding of planned route, purpose, arrival time, and passengers.  Good idea!
7. Other interesting items:
   • The federal STANDUP Act will be introduced soon in the U.S. Senate (which it was on April 28)
   • Rumble strips – those indentations in the asphalt that make a startling noise when a driver drifts off the side of a road – are very effective.
   • Aside from changes in technology inside cars such as dashboard-mounted computer screens, the next wave in traffic safety will be crash avoidance, which includes car-to-car sensors, and road-to-car sensors that keep cars in lane or warn them of objects ahead.
   • The vast majority of traffic fatalities in our country do not occur on Interstate highways but rural, two-lane roads.
   • NHTSA now maps traffic fatalities nationally; the map is on its website, www.nhtsa.gov.
8. One simple reason that texting is so dangerous:  Avoiding a crash takes about three seconds:  one second to identify the risk, one second to react, and one second to start the braking or evasive maneuver process.  But the average text message requires the sender to look at the screen for at least five seconds.  Thus, texting eliminates reaction time to circumstances that cause crashes.
9. At the conference, students from high schools in Minnesota, Florida, and New York spoke about a peer-education program for teen drivers called Act Out Loud.  Allstate is a sponsor.  One of the kids described an intra-school exercise in which one student was appointed The Grim Reaper for the day.  This Reaper roamed throughout the school, tapping on the shoulder the appropriate number of students who die each year in that state in driving accidents.  The students tapped “disappear” – they are forbidden from speaking to anyone for the rest of the day.  At the end of school, the “dead” students assemble at the school’s front entrance, to demonstrate the magnitude of annual loss of teen drivers.  Very effective, I thought.
10. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has launched a fabulous, comprehensive safe teen driving website.  I’ve navigated it several times, and highly recommend it.

Not bad for a three-day conference.

A blog called Juggle, part of the Wall Street Journal, recently posed the question, “When Should Your Teen Start Driving?”  The article raised issues that have been debated for years by legislators and traffic safety professionals across the country:  Should the minimum age for licensing teen drivers be 15, 16, 17, or even 18?

I respectfully submit that this question can mislead parents.

When state governments adopt teen driving laws, they establish simple, clear minimums.  Lawyers often call these “bright line standards,” meaning that whether the rule is good or bad public policy, at least it is clear:  if the minimum age is 16, and your teen is 15 years, 364 days old, she cannot get a learner’s permit or a license, but if she is 16 years, 1 day old she can.  Put another way, teen driver laws tell parents and teens when their teens become eligible to apply for a permit or a license.  The birth certificate does the rest.

Thus, when states set a minimum age, they establish a single rule for every teen and every family.  Across most of the United States, state laws allow teens to obtain learner’s permits when they turn 16 and a so-called restricted, provisional, or junior license a few months later.  Whether the minimum age should be higher has been debated nationally, as the Wall Street Journal article discusses.  Here in Connecticut, when our statewide Task Force met in 2008 to revise our laws, some argued that if the minimum age were raised to 17 or 18, it would actually be harder for many parents to train their teens to drive, because so many leave the house around age 18, to attend college or begin a job.  On the other hand, New Jersey has just published a study showing that raising its minimum age for a license to 17 has reduced crash and fatality rates measurably among 16, 17, and even 18 year olds.

But asking what the statewide minimum should be is a deceiving question for parents; your proper focus should be at what age your teen should be allowed to drive, regardless of what state law says.  Some commentators call this the “age of responsibility,” to distinguish it from the “age of eligibility.”

The critical caution for parents is that each state’s minimum driving age, the one simple rule for the state’s entire population, is influenced by politics – legislators vying for support and votes of parents; tradition (the minimum age has been about 16 for a generation); culture (America romanticizes its automobiles); and simplicity / governments need rules that are easy to administer).  But in no way, shape, or form are these driving ages based on public officials or law enforcement concluding that science or crash data show that all or most teens can safely drive at age 16, 17, or 18.  In fact, these ages are directly contrary to what science, crash data, and numerous teen driver studies now tell us.  If teen driver laws strictly followed science and data, the minimum driving age would be somewhere between 22 and 27!

So, parents, do not be misled:  state law may say that your son or daughter is now old enough to drive, but in your judgment, is he or she ready to drive safely?  The factors to assess here are appreciation of risk (is your child a daredevil?); emotional maturity (can your child handle the stress of driving?); physical maturity (is your child coordinated enough to handle a car, strong enough to change a tire?); and fear (will the dangers of driving overwhelm your teen’s driver training?).  Every parent needs to make these judgments about every teen.  In this calculation, the two factors that have no place whatsoever are the convenience to the parent / family of having another driver in the house, and peer pressure from your teen’s friends.

This blog is about informed decisions by parents.  One critical element is to understand that just because your state’s teen driver laws allows your teen to obtain a license does not mean that the state has determined that that age is safe for most teens, and it is up to you to be the extra filter in the process, to decide whether your teen is ready to learn to be, and become, a responsible driver.  Forget the “legal age” and focus on the “age of responsibility.”  Your state may have a law, but you have a veto.

On Monday, April 12, in Philadelphia, my work on this blog will be recognized by the National Transportation Safety Highway Administration (”NHTSA”) at its annual public service awards luncheon, part of the Lifesavers Conference.  I am deeply grateful to NHTSA for this honor, and for the opportunity to spread the word about this blog to traffic safety professionals and parents across the country.  Special thanks to Mario Damiata and his colleagues at NHTSA Region 1 for nominating me, and to Joe Cristalli of the Connecticut Department of Transportation, and the folks at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center for their support.  I am also grateful to Curt Clarisey of Clarisey Consulting (clarisey.com) in Simsbury, Connecticut for designing and maintaining this blog.

Finally, my thanks to so many parents who have written to let me know that the blog has been helpful.  My favorite e-mail remains this one:

Before I read your blog, if you asked me how I was doing with our two teen drivers, I would have said, “Well enough.”  After reading your blog, my answer became, “Not nearly enough.”

 

NHTSA’s press release is found at:  http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/NHTSA-02-10

Picture this:  Your teen, a licensed driver for several months, receives a ticket from a police officer for violating some provision of your state’s teen driver laws – speeding, illegal passengers, on the road after curfew, violating cell phone restrictions, some type of moving violation. The teen pleads with you that “I didn’t do it!,” or the police made a mistake, or the officer singled her out from among other drivers whose driving was much worse because she’s a teenager.  Or the police were sneaky, lying in wait behind a sign or a tree.  “It’s just not fair!” pleads your young driver.  This was her first direct encounter with the police.

A teen driver receiving a ticket sets three things in motion for parents/guardians and teens.  First, the parent and teen need to talk through what happened (and get past the initial denials).  Second, the teen driver and parent need to decide whether they will challenge the ticket or accept the consequences — paying a fine, incurring driving record points, or receiving a license suspension.  Third, parent and teen need to decide when they are going to respond.

This third decision is important.  It is influenced by the fact that there is almost always an administrative lag time between when police issue a ticket and when the government processes the driver’s response or a court issues a hearing date. Every state administers tickets for driving violations differently.   Weeks or even months can elapse between when a ticket is issued to a teen driver and when she receives notice of the penalty for a violation or notice of a court date.  Meanwhile, unless the parent and teen have signed a teen driving contract that results in an immediate suspension, the teen may continue to drive.

For the parent of a teen driver, this situation and these decisions (what happened, how to respond, and when) are a critical teaching moment.  At stake are (1) your teen’s respect for the law in general and teen driver laws in particular; (2) her respect for law enforcement; and (3) her understanding that driving implicates the safety of dozens of other people.  Your approach to each of these issues will affect your teen’s approach to driving.

This concern about parent conduct and guidance is not hypothetical.  In 2007, Massachusetts adopted a mandatory license suspension system for teens who violated its GDLs.  Suspensions started at 60 days for a first offense and went up from there for repeat offenses.  Within months of the start of enforcement, the news media began to report about parents resisting fiercely – screaming at prosecutors and court personnel, doing everything possible to avoid suspensions of their teens’ licenses.  These parents were no doubt angry about the inconvenience of now having to again drive their teens to school and events and losing their new, in-house, pick-up and delivery service.  But what struck me about these news articles was envisioning the teens standing there, watching their parents challenge and disparage police, prosecutors, and court staff.

I recognize that police can make mistakes, and that sometimes they use enforcement techniques such as speed traps that can seem sneaky and unfair.  Police can appear arbitrary when ticketing some while others offenders go unpunished.  Moreover, a police officer stopping a teen driver can create the perception that the teen has been profiled, that is, stopped due to her apparent age rather than her driving. 

But back to the teaching moment and the three issues:  While parents should review with their teens the events that led to the ticket, they should also recognize that factually baseless tickets are a relatively rare occurrence.  From my experience on Connecticut’s teen driving task force, which included state and local police, I conclude that one of the best assurances we have that tickets issued to teen drivers usually have some actual basis is that the police generally have far more responsibilities than they can handle;  they issue tickets only when misconduct genuinely threatens public safety.

If we assume that most tickets have some basis, then we can focus on the key point:  A parent’s reaction and approach to a teen driver’s ticket  presents a critical opportunity to provide several safe driving lessons.  Parents, please:

• Don’t disparage the teen driving laws as baseless or unfair.

• Push back against your teen’s insistence that the police officer was mistaken, arbitrary, vindictive, or stupid.

• Direct your teen to accept the consequence of her action.

• Don’t argue with prosecutors or court staff about your teen’s conduct.

• Don’t let inconvenience or cost to you get in the way of these lessons.

• Don’t delay; have your teen take the medicine. Don’t ask a court for repeated continuances (delays), and don’t make excuses (”She has a quiz/game/lesson”) that pale against safety.

As those of you who have read the “My Story” portion of this blog know, this issue is personal for me.  My son Reid got his license in January 2006, a ticket for a lane-change violation in April, and then a speeding ticket (42 mph in a 25 mph zone) in September.  The second ticket required him to take a four-hour retraining class at the Department of Motor Vehicles.  He had 90 days to schedule it.  He put it off and off and off, until he finally scheduled it for the 89th day, December 2.  He crashed eleven hours before his retraining class was scheduled to begin, and died five hours later.

This blog’s focus is safer teen driving, but let me digress to a larger issue about safe driving in general.

I research topics for posts on this blog primarily by reading everything remotely relevant that I can find.  Most recently, I have followed closely the “Driven to Distraction” series in The New York Times, written mostly by reporter Matt Richtel; the book Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt (excellent); and websites of such organizations as the Safe Roads Coalition,  AAA Foundation,  Center for Disease Control, and NHTSA.  In addition to timely information, these sources give me hope that teen driver fatalities and crashes will continue to decline as they have in recent years, and that parents across the country will become ever more aware of the dangers of teen driving and increasingly informed and proactive as they oversee their newly-licensed drivers.

These sources also discuss the burgeoning array of safe driving technologies, such as front end sensors that stop a car and prevent a crash even when the driver doesn’t brake.  From my reading it is clear that, across the nation, thousands of people are working hard every day to educate drivers, inform parents, and improve automobile safety in general and teen driver safety in particular.

Which is why it drives me crazy (pun neither intended nor avoidable) to read about the forces that are making driving more dangerous.

Matt Richtel’s recent columns have spotlighted the trend, now in progress, of auto manufacturers adding more distracting electronics to cars, mainly multi-purpose, interactive computer screens that offer not only telecommunications, navigation, and sound systems but also consumer electronics and video entertainment.  (Mr. Richtel, by the way, deserves not only the Pulitzer Prize but the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless efforts and penetrating analyses of these trends).  The functions, sophistication, and availability of these systems are limited only by the imaginations and collaborations of electronics and auto industry engineers and consumer preferences and budgets, but there does not appear to be any doubt that:  dashboards will be the location; big screens will be the basic installation; distracting, interactive functions will be the norm; and entirely preventable crashes and fatalities will be the result.

I am not an electronics expert, and predicting the exact shape of these imminent amenities is not my focus.  The point is that while research is pouring in about the dangers of distracted driving, electronics and auto manufacturing companies are working as quickly as they can to introduce new features into cars that, we can predict with certainty, will counteract the efforts of the public safety community.

It appears from what I have read that the universal defense from the business community is that they are only responding to consumer demand, and as is their mantra, safety “is a matter of individual responsibility.”  In other words, if your car comes with a dashboard-mounted screen that allows you, while driving on an Interstate, to launch a browser, search for the nearest restaurant, and display reviews of its food and service, then it is simply up to you as a driver to do so responsibility and safely.

The fallacy of this argument, of course, is that driving, more than any other activity in our society, implicates the safety of others.  As Tom Vanderbilt, in his book Traffic, so aptly observes, in no other places do so many people, such a diverse population, mingle so freely – and dangerously – as on highways and public streets.  In no other activity does one person randomly threaten more people than when a driver takes his eyes off the road to interact with a video screen or use a keyboard.

Thus, we have ongoing today, simultaneously, not only nationwide efforts to improve safety, but also to introduce into cars new technologies that will cause death and serious injury in exactly the ways that so many are trying to prevent.  This marching in opposite directions is simply madness.

Businesses, governments, and schools have long understood that one way to boost achievement and promote compliance is to shine a spotlight, to publicize lists of who qualifies for a status, who has followed the rules or who has not.  Businesses post the names of employees with perfect attendance records.  Governments publish the roll of who is behind on property tax payments.  Schools print their honor rolls in local newspapers.  Public recognition is an incentive to do the right thing, while public reckoning can be a powerful deterrent.

Back in the good old days – the 1990’s and before – such publicity primarily involved newspapers and bulletin boards, but in recent years, of course, it has migrated to websites.  Perhaps the most prominent and earliest example of government use of a website as a deterrent has been registries, publicly available lists, of where convicted sex offenders live.

So, the Web it now is, and I believe it is now safe to assume that every high school in the U.S. has at least a modest website.  Offering one bit of confirmation of this phenomenon, USA Today reported last week that schools districts around the country are considering paid advertising on their websites as a way to help meet their budget deficits.  The article
(March 18, 2010, p. 3A) quotes administrators as targeting businesses whose products promote education or safety.

Why then can’t we use school websites to help promote safer teen driving?

Many schools already do, in the sense of announcing safe driving events such as a guest speaker, the schedule for driver education classes, or a school-wide safe teen driving poster contest.  My suggestion here, however, envisions a step beyond these merely informational messages:  using the website to shape behavior by shining a spotlight on legal drivers, good drivers, and maybe even bad drivers.

Consider these potential additions to high school websites, presented here in ascending order of boldness and (I agree) potential controversy:

• a list of each student who has had his or her license long enough to carry passengers legally (many Graduated Driver Laws now specify a period of no passengers for newly-licensed drivers, followed by several months of “immediate family only,” and then unrestricted passengers);

• a list of each student who is now permitted to carry passengers and, since getting a license, has not been convicted of a moving violation or other serious misconduct;

• a list, regardless of how long since licensing, of every student who has been convicted of a moving violation or other misconduct (which, of course, includes any type of impaired driving); or

• some combination of these lists.

I hope that the potential benefits of these website lists are obvious.  First and foremost, a critical piece of information for parents of students at every school where kids are allowed to have cars – which in many suburban high schools is the vast majority of juniors and seniors – is who is legally permitted to carry passengers.  In my previous blog post, “I Give My Child Permission To Drive With . . .,” I spotlighted the issues for schools and parents that are embedded in the forms by which parents allow their kids to be driven to or from school, or to or from school events, by other students.  Shouldn’t these forms and decisions be accompanied by confirmation about which students are legal chauffeurs, and which have not been convicted of a violation?  And doesn’t this information cry out for a centralized, electronically-accessible list?

What about the administrative burden of collecting and maintaining this list?  Well, yes, it will probably take someone on staff a few hours to compile the initial list and a few minutes now and then to update it, but I doubt that the time required will be significant, and in any event, the safety benefits and greater peace-of-mind should make it worthwhile.  Moreover, I highly suspect that, at least for options 1 and 2 above (allowed to carry passengers, or allowed plus no violation) can run on a self-reporting basis.  Students and maybe even parents will consider adding their names to those lists a type of mini-graduation, an announcement that Teen A has climbed another step toward adulthood.  Thus, all that may be needed is for the school to establish the list and explain how to add a name and the date on which the student “became legal.”  There could be some work involved if a student already on the list is convicted of a violation and should have his/her name removed, but presumably this would be a relatively small number.

I recognize that the third option, posting the names of every student convicted of driving misconduct, will be more controversial, especially among parents, and involves a problem of how schools will obtain the information.  In some states, such a list might require a change to the teen driver laws.  But I ask this question:  Many schools now impose penalties such as revoking privileges or stripping students of leadership positions for drug or alcohol violations or other egregious behavior.  Why not serious driving misconduct?  Speeding?  Texting while behind the wheel?  Drag racing?  Is it more important to regard a student’s driving record as a matter of personal privacy than to alert fellow students and parents to which teen drivers have not yet gotten the message that driving is the leading cause of death of teenagers in the U.S.?

Dedicating a small corner of a school website to a list of drivers who can carry passengers, and/or so-far have been safe or unsafe drivers is not a cure-all.  In particular, simply because Student A has now had a full license long enough to carry passengers and has managed this initial period without a violation does not, by any measure, ensure that we now have a reliably safe or experienced driver, as other posts on this blog explain in detail.  Yet, the primary goal of this blog is to help parents make better decisions about when their teens should get behind the wheel or should get into a car when a teen will be behind the wheel.  In this regard, high school websites offer a low-hanging fruit, a relatively simple way to provide helpful, timely information to parents that will help them make these better decisions.

Every summer, most high schools in the U.S. send forms to parents and guardians that ask for permission for various activities at school.  The forms usually include something like this:

_____        _____        I give permission for my child to drive to

  Yes            No           and from school.

_____        _____        I give permission for my child to ride to

  Yes            No           school events with other students as drivers.

_____        _____        I give permission for my child to drive

  Yes            No           other students to school events.

This is usually the total extent of the forms, though sometimes they also ask if the student is authorized to drive a sibling to school, and sometimes they ask the parent / guardian to verify that the car the child will drive is insured.

These forms are a multi-part invitation to trouble.  Why?

• Statistics repeatedly show that the most dangerous hours for teen drivers are the two hours directly after school lets out;

• These “Yes / No” forms, if checked yes, allow your child, with the school’s blessing, to ride as a passenger with a driver unknown to you, and with other students in the car;

• These forms rarely make any reference to the state’s teen driving law, such as passenger restrictions;

• These forms often give the impression that school events are an exception to teen driver laws; and

• These forms not only encourage but authorize a practice that we know is dangerous, teens driving with passengers.

Why do schools use these forms?  To save money on transportation and gas, no doubt.  Why do parents agree?  Well, the forms come from the school, so someone must have decided that students driving other students is safe, right?

Or perhaps, as I suspect, these are the same forms that have been in use for decades, and no one has thought to change them to reflect better the dangers of teen driving in general and of passengers and after school hours in particular.

In fairness, there is one part of the driving authorized by these forms that actually carries a lower risk:  Elsewhere on this blog, I have discussed the difference between “purposeful” and “recreational” driving.  When a teen driver has a destination, a route, a timetable, and a consequence for not arriving safely and on schedule, crash risks are lower.  Most of the types of driving authorized by these forms are, I suppose, purposeful.  But this is the only counterweight to an otherwise dangerous practice of schools asking parents and guardians for blanket permission for teens to drive with other teens as passengers.

What should schools and parents do?

1. Not allow high school students to drive other students to school events, period.  If transportation is needed, buses should be used or parents / guardians should be the drivers.
2. Barring this complete prohibition, schools can:
   • remind parents on the forms themselves that the state’s passenger rules are (for example, “Our state prohibits teen drivers from carrying non-family passengers for one year after licensing”);
   • identify on the school’s website those students who are permitted by state law to carry passengers;
   • on a case-by-case, event-to-event basis, remind students and parents when their transportation to and from a school event will involve a teen driver;
   • bar any teen who receives a ticket or citation from driving other students (which, of course, requires the teen or parents to notify the school); and
   • have each teen driver sign a school version of a teen driver contract, committing to safe practices such as no electronic devices and a willingness to ask for help if fatigue sets in (which can happen particularly after athletic events).
3. Remind every student who will be a passenger of a student driver of the importance of being a good passenger:  no distractions, use safety belts, and if your driver engages in unsafe driving, get out of the car.

Any parent, guardian, or school official who dismisses these ideas as too much work is invited to read the other parts of this blog.

Dear Readers: After five months of blogging, I have provided you here with a great deal to read about cars, teens, accidents, and safe driving. As an alternative to your plowing through these articles, now on this blog is a video of a presentation that I made to a group of parents of teen drivers at a high school on January 14, 2010.  It runs 40 minutes, and contains the most important points that I have tried to communicate through this blog. This video is also now on YouTube (in segments).  I hope you will find this presentation to be informative and user-friendly.

Thanks, Tim