John Rosemond, the parenting-advice columnist, recently posed this question to parents of teens:  Would you allow your son or daughter to participate in an activity that had a one in 10,000 chance of death?  To a person, the parents said no.

Then Rosemond revealed that the activity he was talking about was driving.

The government, insurance companies, and highway safety analysts and advocates have collected mountains of data about driving, and the numbers they report vary somewhat, but I think I’m on safe ground to say that there are approximately 9,000,000 teen drivers in the United States, and annually about 6,000 die in crashes and 400,000 are seriously injured (and that is just drivers; passengers, other drivers, and pedestrians are hurt also, but let’s stick with drivers for the moment).  These numbers equate to a one in 1,500 chance of death for teen drivers and a one in 14 chance of a serious injury.

But, as Mark Twain alluded to when he wrote about “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” these averages tell an incomplete and misleading story.  As the saying goes, if I have one foot in an ice bucket and one on a bed of hot coals, on average I am comfortable, but that’s not the whole story.  Applied to teen driving, these calculations of average hide the fact that even the best-trained, law-abiding teens are at risk (maybe Rosemond picked one in 10,000 to represent the most careful teen drivers) but there are several factors, behaviors while driving, that elevate the risk far above these scary-enough-as-is averages.

Teen driving always involves what experts call “baseline dangers” – see my 9/15/09 post entitled “There Is No Such Thing As A Safe Teen Driver.”  The brains of teens do not yet fully appreciate risk and danger; teens lack the experience and judgment essential to driving; and after getting their licenses, whenever they drive on roads or to places they have not seen before, teens are simultaneously learning to drive and to navigate.  In addition, they may be driving a vehicle entirely different from the one in which they learned to drive.  As a driving instructor once told to me, “We train them in a Ford Taurus on local streets in the suburbs, and then their first trip is to drive an SUV on the MassPike into downtown Boston.”  Thus, if we were to prepare a safety scale for teen drivers and assign a label to each tier, the lowest, safest level would be “At Risk,” not “Safe.”

The point is that for teens, the dangers start at “at risk” and go up from there.  It is impossible to rank these risk-elevating factors or assign them point totals, because each factor has its own variations and levels – speed and blood alcohol level, for example.  We do have approximations, however, such as the recent study concluding that drivers who text are 23 times more likely to crash than those who don’t.  My purpose here is only to make parents aware of that there are factors that spike the punchbowl, so to speak:

• drugs, alcohol, and anything that impairs reflexes and judgment; 
• distracted driving (texting, cellphones, Ipods, other electronic devices); 
• speeding; 
• passengers; 
• failure to use seat belts; and 
• bad weather and night driving.

Other factors with documented risk-enhancing consequences are fatigue, emotion (“road rage”), and any other reckless behavior.

These factors make the averages discussed above virtually meaningless.  If the safest teen driver is at risk and the average teen driver has a one in 1,500 chance of dying behind the wheel, these higher-risk factors push the odds of a serious crash into categories that could be called “Waiting to Happen” or “Imminent.”  Then, if a teen driver combines one or more of these higher risk factors, the relevance of these averages diminishes even further because the likelihood of a debilitating crash goes even higher:  alcohol and texting, speeding and passengers, drug use and no seat belts, etc.

To bring the point back to Mr. Rosemond:  bear in mind and explain to your teens that the statistical, average likelihood of them getting into a serious crash is high to begin with, but there are behaviors and choices that can transform that average into a virtual certainty.

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