States Put Brakes on Teenage Drivers

Nick LeBlanc rues his reckless youth. Back when he was 16, he bought an old Chevy pickup and took a girl he liked out for a ride down a country road on a summer night.

Just as he reached over to turn down the radio, he hit a telephone pole. The girl bounced braces-first off the dashboard and into the windshield. She split her lower lip.

“After that night, she didn’t want nothing to do with me,” he says.

The patrolman who had been tailing his speeding vehicle wasn’t very forgiving either. “Driving too fast, failure to stop, reckless driving, driving to endanger,” LeBlanc said nonchalantly as he hung out at the auto shop at Concord Senior High School. “They got me for everything.”

The lesson? “I don’t think people should get their licenses until they’re 18,” he says.

LeBlanc, who turned 17 last month, had his taken away for at least that long. Accident-prone kids like him are the reason why New Hampshire on Jan. 1 began sharply restricting the driving privileges of its young people, adopting a law similar to one that goes into effect in California this July.

The two states would seem to be as far apart as 2,947 miles of highway would suggest. New Hampshire has a population the size of San Diego’s, no mandatory seat belt law for adults, state liquor stores that sit next to state highway rest stops, and license plates stamped with the slogan “Live Free or Die.”

Yet both places are on the leading edge of a new push to solve an old problem--the fact that teens cause disproportionately more accidents than other people--by sharply limiting their driving privileges. Parents and lawmakers have embraced the idea across the country, even though teenage traffic fatalities actually have fallen since the days when many of today’s baby boomers were novice motorists.

“I don’t think most of them would be real eager to see their children go out and do some of the things that they did as children,” said Patricia Waller, head of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan.

New Hampshire and California are among 11 states that passed laws last year limiting how often and under what conditions teens can drive cars, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Though details vary, the laws generally prevent young drivers from driving late at night, without a parent or with carloads of other kids.

Some states are even using driver’s licenses like a ruler across the knuckles. Colorado lawmakers, for instance, decided to revoke the license of anybody convicted of painting graffiti. Others have linked driver’s licenses to school attendance.

Easing Teens Into Full Driving Freedom

New Hampshire and California, however, are among eight states that have enacted what traffic safety experts consider state-of-the-art graduated licensing programs, a concept in vogue with federal highway safety and insurance industry experts. They hope this system will succeed where everything else has failed.

The graduated program requires teens to follow three distinct levels of driving freedom. The purpose is to ease them onto the freeways by requiring parents to supervise them and by limiting the conditions in which they are likely to crash.

In New Hampshire, teenagers need to spend six months with a learner’s permit before qualifying for a second license that prevents them from driving between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. until they turn 18. And for the first three months of this provisional license, teens can’t drive unless they’re accompanied by a passenger who is 25 or older. A driver also can’t carry more passengers than there are seat belts in the car until he or she turns 18.

California’s new law is tougher in some ways. The learner’s permit period has been extended from 30 days to six months, and a parent or other adult has to supervise 50 hours of driving.

After passing a road test, a new driver gets a second license that doesn’t allow carrying other teens in the car for the first six months or driving between midnight and 5 a.m. for the first year unless an adult 25 or older comes along.

At least 18 state legislatures are expected to consider similar bills this year, according to the American Automobile Assn., which began lobbying for graduated driver’s license laws after the law passed in California. Spokesman Mike Morrissey said the Auto Club hopes to get every state to adopt such restrictions by 2000.

“That’s pretty ambitious, but if you look at the momentum that’s been generated that’s certainly an attainable goal,” he said. “Oftentimes things gain momentum by being adopted in California. This is the most successful campaign we’ve ever undertaken.”

What is striking about the speed with which these laws are being enacted is the fact that reckless teen driving is an old problem. The momentum to curb it seems fueled as much by the attitudes of today’s parents, the baby boomers whose children are finally coming of age in an era that just seems more dangerous.

“When we ask parents what they fear most, all the other things combined don’t even come close to traffic deaths,” said Mark Edwards, manager of traffic safety for AAA. “I’m 53, and I learned how to drive when I was 14. Now that I’m 53, I might ask myself: Why is it important that my children drive at age 16?”

Boom in Teen Drivers Expected

Traffic safety experts also say the fact that the boomers’ children--the boomlets--are reaching their mid-teens creates something of a demographic imperative to head off what could be an abrupt jump in teenage traffic carnage.

“This is the first increase in this vulnerable age group we’ve seen in a while,” said Leo Tasca, senior researcher for the Transportation Ministry of Ontario, which adopted graduated licensing in 1994.

“For years we’ve known that fatalities involving teens have been more catastrophic than [among] other age groups. Now, I think there is a tendency to forestall that. I think we’ve become more risk-averse.”

In each of the states that have limited teen driving privileges, the case for tougher laws was delivered with a breathless immediacy that belied the fact that the problem is as old as the automobile. In each case, the arguments have been identical: Car crashes are the leading cause of death of teenagers (who face few other health threats). Nothing is deadlier than a 16-year-old with a car (though more people die annually in cars driven by 21-year-olds).

Typically, proponents point to a particularly grisly crash involving a carload of kids.

The campaign in New Hampshire caught fire when nine youngsters from the same area were killed in traffic accidents during a 15-month span in 1995 and 1996. The restrictions passed the state Legislature easily, even though some state lawmakers complained that the new law unfairly penalizes the majority of young motorists who didn’t crash--and put additional burdens on parents, particularly single and working parents, to shuttle their kids around.

The debate also left a lingering feeling that the highways are littered with dead teenagers.

“Kids are driving faster, and the result has been more serious accidents, more fatal accidents,” said Jeff Siegel, a Concord High administrator in charge of driver education. “Well, I don’t know if kids are driving faster. I do know there is more traffic on the road.”

Yet according to federal highway statistics, the number of fatalities in which a teen was driving dropped from 38 in 1987 in New Hampshire to 18 in 1996. In fact, the number of traffic fatalities for teens nationwide fell from 9,356 in 1976 to 5,779 two years ago.

Frederick King, a 69-year-old state senator who voted against the law, said: “Kids don’t start out walking perfectly. They don’t start out riding bikes particularly well, either,” but they have to start somewhere. “I live in a rural area. Kids get up early and go to work. They stay out late to go to dances.”

Every time a carload of youngsters cracks up, he said, a television news helicopter hovers overhead, bringing scary footage back to high-strung parents.

Liz Storch, a Concord mother of two teenagers, is certain that teen highway deaths have reached epidemic proportions. Her daughter Jane, who turned 16 last year, could have qualified for a full-blown driver’s license, but Storch held the girl back.

“I wanted her under this law,” she said. “As a parent, [teenage driving] is the scariest thing for me.”

Jane, who grasped the art of angle parking enough to ace her driving test two weeks ago, said picking up her license was somewhat anticlimactic, since she has to drive with a parent for three months. “Nobody likes it,” she said. “It takes away the excitement of getting your license.”

One reason for the popularity of the graduated driver’s license is the fact that other measures, such as classroom driver’s education and tougher penalties against teen traffic terrors, have failed.

“What we do in driver education violates everything we know about learning,” said Waller, a psychologist. “The standard was to give the kid 30 hours in the classroom and six hours behind the wheel and turn them loose. Then we said if you make mistakes, we’re going to punish you more than any of us would be punished if we made those mistakes.”

‘A Lot of Parents Don’t Drive That Well’

A key feature of the graduated licensing system is the amount of responsibility it puts on parents to ride along with their kids. “Of course, a lot of parents don’t drive that well,” Waller said. “As soon as a kid can read the speed limit and read the speed you’re driving, you’re teaching them to drive.”

In fact, she said a Michigan State University study found that the best predictor of a student’s driving record was his or her father’s record.

The graduated licensing system was developed by Waller 30 years ago, though there was little interest until New Zealand adopted it in 1987. Nova Scotia and Ontario followed suit in 1994 and Michigan adopted a version two years later, followed by seven other states. North Carolina’s might be the toughest: The nighttime driving curfew begins--which means many teen dates must end--at 9 p.m.

New Zealand’s studies show a drop in teen fatalities possibly attributable to its license system in a range of 7% to 23%, Tasca said. He just finished a study of Ontario’s statistics but wouldn’t release results until they have been reviewed by senior staff. He did say the ranges were “definitely close” to New Zealand’s.

Enforcement could be difficult. Police can’t stop young drivers just because they look young. Concord police Capt. Jerome Madden said it’s doubtful that cops have their antennae out yet; only people who have turned 16 and gotten a driver’s license since January are covered by the new law.

Parents Micromanage Children’s Lives

Although AAA takes credit for the system’s sudden popularity--”If Patricia [Waller] wants to take credit for thinking it up, AAA will take credit for getting all of these states to pass it,” says Edwards--there seem to be other reasons why so many people believe it’s time to tame teenage drivers.

Waller said teen road skills may just be one of those public safety issues that achieves a sort of critical mass, like seat belt laws and tougher drunk-driving rules in previous decades.

Siegel, the Concord High administrator, has a daughter in driver’s education and a son a year away. He said parents today seem more eager to micromanage their children’s lives. “Demographically, boomers are the largest generation in the history of the world,” he said. “And they flex their might in a lot of different ways.

“It seems to me that parents are incredibly more involved than their parents were,” Siegel said.

Some people have argued that accidents are relative. If teen drivers are taken out of the equation, another age group would be considered the biggest risk on the road. The National Institute on Aging has been studying the disproportionate numbers of accidents caused by elderly drivers, a trend that is likely to increase as baby boomers age.

Highway design, alternative transportation and licensing rules for older people are issues that will become critical in the coming years, Waller said.

By then, statehouses are likely to be filled with people who were 16 when today’s lawmakers decided to crack down on young drivers. People who are now Nick LeBlanc’s age may be passing the laws governing the old.

LeBlanc, though, is more preoccupied with turning 18 and reapplying for his driver’s license and taking his latest car, a Pontiac Bonneville, out for a legal spin. He has, he said, learned his lesson.

“If I feel like laying some rubber or burning out, I’m going to go where there’s no civilization, you know what I’m saying?”

Researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.

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Teens Lead in Traffic Deaths

States across the country are now restricting the rights of teenage drivers, though the number of actual teenage fatalities is declining.

Down 22% since ’88

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration