My last post commented on an article in The New York Times entitled “New Lessons to Pave a Road to Safety” (April 18, 2011, by Tara Parker-Pope), which spotlighted recent research on the impacts of high school starting times on teen driver crash rates. This article also reviewed a recent study by Dr Dennis Durbin, co-director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which was published in the Journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention. I have commented several times previously about CHOP’s excellent teen driving website and its first-rate academic research.
I will try to do justice to Dr. Durbin’s article as summarized in the Times. His study attributes almost two-thirds of teen driver crashes to “three novice driving mistakes”: failing to scan the road, misjudging driving conditions, and becoming distracted. Specifically, Dr. Durbin calculated that 21 percent of crashes result from not conducting regular visual sweeps of the road ahead, not checking mirrors, not judging the speed of oncoming vehicles, and not realizing how large vehicles like trucks can block a driver’s view. The study ascribes another 21 percent of crashes to making incorrect assumptions about road conditions, such as whether curves are slippery when wet. Another 20 percent are attributed to distraction, “not necessarily from a cell phone, but usually from another passenger in the car.”
So far so good. We can all be appreciative of academic research that quantifies the types of mistakes that lead teen drivers to crash. The article, however, goes on to offer advice about what parents should do in light of Dr. Durbin’s findings. The recommendations are: (1) “create programs that can help parents more intentionally” counteract these three causes; (2) let teens drive more frequently when road conditions are poor: and (3) engage in “narrative driving,” in which the adult drives while giving the teenage passenger a play-by-play of safe driving, such as why and when to change lanes, slow down, or check mirrors.
With all due respect, I disagree with this advice. It is a headfake, advice from an expert that can mislead a parent. The clear suggestion is that if parents will simply work with their teen drivers on scanning techniques, judging the speed of other cars, evaluating road conditions, and not being distracted — that is, vehicle handling techniques — then all will be well; their teens will be safe drivers. Not so.
The problem, as outlined in many other posts on this blog, starting with “There is No Such Thing As A Safe Teen Driver” (September 15, 2009), is that even dozens of hours of instruction focused intently on the three specific crash causes spotlighted by Dr. Durbin’s study cannot overcome three realities that make teen driving dangerous: the human brain does not fully appreciate risk and danger until we reach our early to mid-twenties; it takes three to five years of experience to learn to be a safe driver; and teens are learning to drive and navigate at the same time, which is very difficult (we train teens in compact cars on familiar local streets and then let them drive SUV’s and trucks to places they have never driven before). Concentrating on the three problems that the CHOP study so admirably highlights does not alleviate any of these root problems of high teen driver crash rates, and so I respectfully dissent from the suggestion to parents that if they will just take the time to focus on three specific vehicle handling skills, lower crash rates will follow. Would that it were that easy.
This issue is also laid out in my post entitled “Why Driver’s Ed Matters — Except When It Doesn’t” (October 12, 2009). Obviously, instruction about how to handle a vehicle is essential for a young driver, but on the other hand, graduating from Driver’s Education class and following all of the rules of the road have been proven to make little difference in crash rates, because Driver’s Ed does not overcome the root problems either.
In summary, thank you to CHOP and to Dr. Durbin for their meticulous sleuthing and identification of the types of mistakes that predominate in teen driver crashes. However, parents, please don’t think that if we simply adjust our driving instruction to focus on the causes identified in this new study that we can then sit back and relax.
