PHILLIP TAVARES: Dreading the knock on the door late at night

After the Jefferson Memorial event, about two hundred of us participated in a Long Short Walk, which I have written about in recent posts.  Recall that the Long Short Walk originated with the family on Nelson Mandela, whose great granddaughter Zenani , a pedestrian, was killed in a crash in South Africa in 2010.  At the event and on the walk we were joined by Kweku Mandela, Nelson’s grandson and Zenani’s cousin.

Below are photos of me with Secretary Mineta and with Kweku Mandela.  It was an honor to meet them and to be inspired by their efforts to make our roads safer throughout the world.

Presenter Pam Fischer, who has been active in safe teen driving in New Jersey and nationally for 30 years, presented a chart that compared the top five things that, according to surveys, parents worry about when it comes to their children, as compared to the actual top five causes of injuries and fatalities:

What Parents Most Worry About

1. Kidnapping
2. Sniper Attack
3. Terrorism
4. Predators/Strangers
5. Drug Abuse

Causes Of Death For Teens And Children

1. Car Crashes
2. Homicide
3. Child Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning

This list in itself was dramatic enough, but as a matter of fact, Pam presented this list on Monday morning April 14, and then that afternoon, as the Lifesavers Conference attendees were at the annual NHTSA awards luncheon, the news of the Boston Marathon bombings started appearing on cell phones throughout the auditorium.  In other words, that afternoon, Number 3 on the parent’s worry list probably escalated to Number 1.

The point of the lists, of course, was to illustrate that parents appear to worry more for their children about unknown and uncontrollable causes than they do about things that, although more often the cause of injury or death, are more commonplace, more familiar, more expected, and perhaps more within their control. Also, I do not know the exact question that was posed to parents to elicit these lists, or how the words “What do you most worry about?” were conveyed.  In any event, the take-away from the chart and Pam Fischer’s remarks was clear:  parents worry less about the safety of their teen drivers than they do about unknown and unpredictable causes of injury or death.  I doubt that anyone who works in traffic safety is surprised by this, but it does shed an interesting light on the continuing problem of how we get parents to pay more attention to the safety risks of teen driving.  The lists reinforce the idea that teen driving crashes are such a regular occurrence that we are not wholly surprised, and therefore less attentive to them than we should be.

But with the acknowledgement that the following does NOT apply to teens, one speaker at Lifesavers explained why talking to a passenger is less distracting than talking to someone on a cellphone.  First, a passenger who is an experienced driver actually can provide some modest benefit as an extra pair of eyes on the road.  Second, a passenger knows when to stop talking, because he or she can see when the driving situation requires the driver’s full attention, which someone on a cellphone cannot.  Third, studies have now shown that it is more cognitively challenging to talk to someone who is not in the car than it is to a passenger.  In other words, a driver and a passenger talking are “in sync” as to the driving situation, but a driver and a cellphone caller are not.  A caller has no idea when the driver needs to switch attention back to the traffic situation, and might in fact say something that requires careful thought — cognitive distraction — at just the wrong time.

So, for teen drivers, any passenger is a distraction, and for experienced drivers, talking on a cellphone is more distracting than talking to a passenger.   Thus, anyone who says that “if I can talk to a passenger, I can talk on a cell phone” is off the mark.

There have been some studies and reports about teens delaying getting licensed until age 18, to avoid the restrictions and requirements of Graduated Driver Licensing laws, and some evidence of crash rates for 18 and 19 year olds going up as a result.  A session led by Bruce Hamilton of the AAA Foundation and Scott Masten of the California DMV shed some light on this topic.

In summary, the current research, which admittedly is not comprehensive or definitive but indicative, shows the following:  First, in states with the strictest GDL systems, there is some evidence that if teens do not become licensed at 16, they wait until they are 18 or older.  This was evident in Scott Masten’s data for California, which has a relatively strict GDL system; the data showed a large number of 16 year olds obtaining their licenses, but then a marked drop off among 17 year olds, followed by a surge among the 18 year olds.  Second, an important safety issue:  crash rates for 18 and 19 year olds who got their licenses without going thorough the GDL restrictions for drivers under 18 had higher crash rates for the first 36 months of licensing that younger drivers who had been through the GDL restrictions.  The important take-away from this (again, data from one state only) is that one of the key benefits of GDL is that the prohibitions and restrictions on new drivers that GDL imposes allow them to get on-the-road experience in less dangerous situations — with passengers, night driving, etc. — before moving on to an unrestricted license.  This information, if documented in more states, would seem to be a powerful argument for extending GDL restrictions to 18 and 19 year olds at least.

The third point from Bruce and Scott’s presentations was that this phenomenon of teens delaying licensing is a relative non-issue in states with lenient GDL systems.  In other words, if state law allow teens to obtain a learner’s permit at age 14 or 15 (as 39 states do) and a license with few restrictions at 16, waiting  until age 18 is much less of an issue.  In these states, delaying licensing to age 18 or 19 or later is an issue of finances, location, or family situation.  Teens who can’t afford to drive don’t do so until they have a job/income; teens in urban areas have less need for cars; and sometimes a family’s situation or a teen’s physical and mental development simply dictate that they are not ready to drive.

As long as I have been writing this blog, one of my core themes has been the idea that There Is No Such Thing As a Safe Teen Driver, with the first and most important of the four reasons for this being that the human brain does not fully develop until we reach about age 22 to 25, and the part of the brain that provides judgment and restraint is the last part to develop.  Thus, I have argued again and again, minimum ages for teen drives, if they were based on science instead of politics, parent convenience, and tradition, would be at least 21 if not 24 or 25, and certainly not 16 or 17.

So I was somewhat caught off guard to be reminded by GHSA’s recent update that in 39 states, the minimum age for getting a learner’s permit is less than 16, and in four states it is under age 15.  For a driver’s license, 5 states license teens at between 14 years, six months and 16, and then 34 states allow the license on a teen’s 16th birthday.  Only one state, New Jersey, has a minimum age of 17 (and that state has a substantial reduction in crash rates as a result).

On this blog I have written previously about the fact that when I served on a Connecticut task force that overhauled our teen driver laws in 2007-08, we got letters from teens saying that the answer to the multiple-fatality crashes that Connecticut had experienced was:  to lower the driving age, “so when teens reach age 16, they will be more experienced drivers.”  At the time, I and other task force members dismissed this thought as a backward way to approach teen driving laws and policies.  The GHSA report, however, has reminded me that 39 states allow exactly what those letter writers advocated,  perhaps not for the precise reason stated, but allow nonetheless.

The point to be reiterated for parents of teen drivers (other than trotting down to your legislature and advocating for a higher minimum age for permits and licenses) is that the more lenient your state’s teen driver law is, the more responsibility you have to supervise and control your teen driver.  This is especially true for the minimum age requirements for learner’s permits and driver’s licenses.

Linked below is a news video about the three crashes. I have no complaint about the video; it is straightforward and accurate (and I apologize but you will have to sit through an ad before getting to the coverage).  But I have posted it because it illustrates three things about our national consciousness of safe teen driving.

First, the only teen driver crashes that get national attention are multiple fatalities. Had these 15 teed died in 15 separate crashes, there would have been no national coverage and in fact local coverage would probably have been limited to small articles in local or regional papers – just another day in America, with teen driver deaths one of the prices we pay for a mobile society.

Second, these crashes vividly remind us, and should remind all parents, that teen drivers with passengers are an invitation to disaster.  This is especially true when the teens are going from or between parties, as opposed to so-called “purposeful driving” where teens have a destination, a route, a timetable, and good reason to arrive safely.

Third, in a subtle yet powerful way, it seems to me that the two segments in this video involving the driving school reinforce this message:  if teens are crashing, the answer must be that we need to provide more behind the wheel training.  Those who have spent any time on this blog know that this attitude is exactly what I view as one of the main problems with our national approach to teen driving.  Too many people, too many parents and supervising adults, think that the answer is giving teens more hours on the road and more driving practice.  My view, on the other hand, starts with my mantra that There Is No Such Thing As A Safe Teen Driver (see my September-October 2009 posts on this subject), because no amount of on-the-road training or hours in Driver’s Ed can overcome the biological and physical limitations, such as incomplete brain development, that prevent teens from being safe drivers.

As always, it is the horrific, multiple-fatality crashes the present the opportunity to rail against what we are doing, or not doing, to prevent them.

The video:

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/cvptve/cvpstream2#/video/us/2013/03/13/howell-dnt-teen-driving-deaths.cnn

The Walk is part of Global Youth Traffic Safety Month, http://www.noys.org/global_youth_traffic_safety_month.aspx, and the United Nations Decade of Action, http://www.who.int/roadsafety/decade_of_action/en/..  GYTSM, which culminates on May 8 with events in Washington D.C., will involve high schools across the country and around the world, focused on safe driving. The Decade of Action seeks to eliminate millions of traffic and pedestrian fatalities between now and 2020.  Both programs are affiliated with the worldwide Zenani Campaign, named in memory of Nelson Mandela’s great-granddaughter Zenani, who was killed in a crash in South Africa in 2010.

You  — individually or with any group of any size — can take a few minutes to join in this important and fun event by organizing and posting information about, and a photo of, your own Long Short Walk.  The essential information can be found here: http://www.makeroadssafe.org/longshortwalk/Pages/homepage.aspx.  In summary, organize a group, take a walk, add up your total mileage, take a photo, and share it with the nation and the world by uploading it to the Long Short Walk website. The Hollister family and friends are organizing and we urge you to do the same.