Two weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking at the Blueprint To Save Lives Conference in St Louis, the biannual meeting of the Missouri traffic safety community — MoDOT, law enforcement, health care, first responders, and policy makers. To a person, the 250 in attendance were and are dedicated, hardworking, and inspiring.
And frustrated with the Missouri legislature. Missouri is one of the few states that does not have a primary seat belt law, does not ban texting by adults, and has a weak teen driver law. I was told that many legislators are quite conservative and just don’t believe that more laws are the answer to society’s problems.
During the conference, I happened to have with me a copy of a SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) 2014 report that compared for the 50 states the number of people aged 15 to 20 who died in 2012 in teen-driver related crashes (not just drivers but all fatalities where a teen driver was involved). In 2012, Connecticut had 22 such fatalities. Missouri had 135.
The population of Connecticut is 3.3 million. Missouri’s is 6.3 million.
So, Missouri has twice the population of Connecticut — and in 2012 had six times the teen driver related fatalities.
Again, please understand that this is not criticism. The Missouri traffic safety people I met are working every day to make their state’s roads safer. Every state is different, and there are of course a million differences between Missouri and Connecticut. But at some level, the differences in the two states’ teen driver laws have to be part of the explanation for these disparate numbers.
In Missouri, teens can get a learner’s permit at 15. At 16 they can drive alone if they have had a learner’s permit for six months. They may have one teen passenger during the first six months after they turn 16, and a three teen passengers after six months with a license. Missouri’s teen driver curfew is 1 AM to 5 AM. The Connecticut differences are: learner’s permit at 16; once licensed, and until age 18, the curfew is 11 PM to 5 AM; no passengers for six months, and no non-family for one year; and CT has a mandatory system of license suspensions for violations, and a mandatory two hour safety class for parents. The one complete similarity is that both states require all teen drivers and their passengers to wear seat belts — but as noted, Missouri does not have a primary law for adults, so the seat belt message to teens is somewhat diluted.
The SADD report does not correlate the strength of teen driver laws with fatality numbers, but in the case of these two states, it seems to me that the differences in the numbers, as compared to the difference in/ratio of population, presents more evidence that stricter teen driver laws save lives.
