There Ain’t No Cure for These Teenage Driver Blues
Took the teenager down to get her learner’s permit the other day. Got her in just under the ol’ wire. “What ol’ wire?” you ask. Clearly you are not a teenager. But if you want an answer, go out on the sidewalk and grab a 15-year-old. Say: “What happens if you haven’t got your learner’s permit by July 1?” Remove phone/CD player earphones from the kid’s head and repeat the question. Hear the ol’ righteous indignation fly.
If you got a kick out of the thought of that experiment, you are no doubt a middle-aged boomer, the constituency that passed the much-heralded Teen Driver Safety Act of 1997, which takes effect next month.
Generally speaking, what the act does is assuage the worries of boomer parents by forcing teenagers to practice with their learner’s permits for six months (as opposed to one month now) before they can get their driver’s licenses. Then, once they pass a driving test, watch numerous screenings of “Red Asphalt” and log 50 hours of supervised practice (as opposed to 30 hours now), they receive a kind of junior license that forces them to drive with a grown-up for another six months any time they want to hit the road with their teenage friends.
What this means if you’re a teenager is that turning 16 is going to be about as rockin’ as, say, a Lawrence Welk arrangement of “Wooly Bully” in waltz time. Which, parents snicker, is the ol’ idea.
Except for one detail: Guess who’s going to be providing all that adult supervision? That’s right, Mom ‘n’ Dad. Hope you’re real good at imparting road wisdom to righteously indignant children at 65 miles an hour. You’re going to be doing a lot of it under the ol’ Teen Driver Safety Act.
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There are probably more productive pastimes than playing Monday-morning quarterback with already passed laws, but the new restrictions on teenage driving are interesting. For one thing, despite the impact this law is going to have on families, almost none of the parents I know considered its hassle potential until about last week.
And for another, this law--like so much recent bring-the-hammer-down legislation--has that suspicious aroma that an outwardly good idea can get when it’s surrounded by just a shade too much rhetoric.
Back when this law passed, much was said about reckless teenage driving. (Minors make up only 4% of licensed California drivers, but constitute 9% of drivers in fatal accidents, the law’s proponents pointed out.)
But much less was made of the fact that traffic fatalities involving teens are rare compared to, say, fatal accidents involving grown men. Even grandparents are more of a traffic menace, in absolute numbers, than kids. And, more broadly, none of these groups is the threat we imagine: Fatality rates in general have been falling steadily for at least a decade.
Mike Males, an author and UC Irvine doctoral candidate who has spent the last few years analyzing statistics on adolescents, noted that the rate of fatal crashes involving teens has dropped by about 38% since 1990; the similar rate for crashes involving adults aged 20-49 has similarly dropped, by about 32%. And by the way, Males noted, the fatality rates are about the same for both groups: 22.4 per hundred thousand population for teens and 23.0 for adults.
What Males sees in the numbers is the novel possibility that “kids basically act like the adults who raise them.” As go our driving habits, so go our kids’. As for our habit of imagining that more laws will relieve us of the necessity to just be loving grown-ups instead of pompous rule-mongers--well, our grandchildren can only hope the next generation won’t be chips off the ol’ block.
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But numbers pale next to emotion. And it’s hard to oppose a law that encourages novice drivers to get in more practice before they hit the road. It would be nice if the rules also applied to, say, novice grown-up drivers, and required the back seat supervision to come from people with good driving records, as opposed to just any adult, but crackdowns on drivers who vote aren’t in the cards, I suppose.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what kind of driver education we all get from this latest effort by boomers to cede yet another aspect of parental discretion to the state. Me, I’m counting my blessings. The new law won’t apply to our teen, which means that, when she’s able to vote, there’s a chance she won’t clamor for payback. I shudder to think what she might put in a Middle-Aged Driver Safety Act.
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com