Before I get to today’s topic, yes I intend to get back soon to ranking the effectiveness of the various facets of Graduated Driver Laws, the AAA Foundation study of passengers, and my model curriculum for a two hour safety class for parents of teen drivers. But first, a quick hit on another topic.
The recent AAA Foundation passenger study has many mind-boggling statistics. Among them is almost 9,600 deaths of 16 and 17 year old drivers nationally from 2005 to 2010. Embedded in this number, however, is the fact that almost two thirds of these fatalities, 65 percent, were boys. A recent article in The New York Times Sunday magazine about the work of Professor Susan Baker at Johns Hopkins University (she has spent her career studying the causes of accidental deaths) highlighted a similar finding in a study of 14,000 teen driver fatalities: among the 15 year old drivers who died, 38 percent of boys and girls were speeding, but among the 19 year olds, the percentage for female drivers dropped to 22 percent while the male percentage remained steady at 38 percent.
Baker’s proposed solution? Boys should get their licenses at a later age.
I have no doubt that this suggestion is politically infeasible (and no doubt the boys would scream about “sex discrimination!”), but part of my job here is to get parents of teen drivers thinking, and the thought I want to implant, if not already there, is the undeniable fact that male teen drivers are at greater risk than females. Parent supervision of boys, roughly speaking, needs to be twice what it is for girls.
Baker’s suggestion also points out one of the frustrating realities of teen driver laws: the statistics often show us how we can save tens of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries, but we are held back by politics, tradition, and under-appreciation of the risks of teen driving and the costs of crashes. We could save thousands of lives simply by raising the minimum driving age in every state to 17, or as Baker suggests, by delaying licensing of boys. It is clear, however, that these suggestions have little chance of ever becoming the law in any state.
We are left with what is feasible in addressing the significant difference in crash rates and fatalities between boys and girls, and I suppose that parents simply adopting the attitude of heightened supervision of boys is the place to start.
