USA Today- Sweet 16: Not For Driving

Posted 11/28/2004 7:43 PM Updated 11/28/2004 9:33 PM

Sweet 16: Not for driving
By Patrick Welsh
USA Today

Two weeks ago, after a 16-year-old student at Churchill High School in Montgomery County, Md., was killed while driving from a party where alcohol was being served, parents met to discuss how to stop teen drinking and driving.

As well intentioned as such forums may be, they dodge the plain fact that the surest way to reduce the number of teen traffic deaths — nearly 8,000 last year — is to reduce the number of teens on the road. The best place to start is with 16-year-olds.

In the U.S., 16-year-olds have a crash rate five times greater than that of 18-year-olds. Although the driving experience of 16- and 18- year-olds has to be taken into account, immaturity plays an even bigger role, especially among boys. The immaturity factor is so strong that, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, driver-education courses have had little or no effect on teen accidents.

Yet, in most states, teens are allowed to get a permit at 15 and a license at 16. If the permit age were pushed up to 16, and if kids were required to hold the permit for a year before getting a license, there would be a substantial reduction in the deaths of teen drivers and their passengers.

In England, the driving age is 17, and in Germany, it is 18. Both countries have lower teen fatality rates than the United States.

Inevitable Resistance

Raising the driving age to 17 would disappoint 16-year-olds who have come to see getting a license as a rite of passage. It would foment an uproar among the growing numbers who have bamboozled their parents into thinking that they are entitled to a new car on their 16th birthday. And many parents would not be too happy to have to wait a year to stop driving their teens around or to delegate the chauffeuring of younger kids to teen drivers.

But any responsible parent would gladly make that sacrifice to avoid the grief that I witnessed last month, when one of my students was killed as she rode with a 16-year-old driver whom police have charged with reckless driving.

Laura Lynam, the best student in my senior English classes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., became the 15th teenager in the Washington metropolitan area to be killed in a car accident in a three-week period.

Brilliant and beautiful, a National Merit semifinalist and a 5-foot-11 powerhouse rower, Laura had unlimited potential. But less than 48 hours after leaving my class on Friday, Oct. 15, that potential was snuffed out when the 16-year-old driver lost control of the Cadillac Escalade in which Laura was a front-seat passenger. Luckily, the driver and the five other teenage passengers in the SUV weren't seriously injured.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that a key to curbing teen driving accidents is limiting the number of passengers a teen driver can have. According to AAA, when there is just one teenage passenger with a driver, the risk of a fatal crash doubles; it goes up fivefold when there are two or more passengers.

Passenger Limits

The 16-year-old who was driving Laura and her friends was in violation of a law enacted in Virginia last year that says a driver 17 or younger may have only one passenger younger than 18 in a car for the first year the driver has a license. After the first year, the teen driver is restricted to three passengers until he or she reaches 18. (The Insurance Institute recommends no teen passengers until a driver is 18.)

Many parents I talked to didn't even know about the law, and from what I see with kids driving to and from school in cars jammed with other kids, the police don't seem to be enforcing it. Obviously, enforcement of passenger limits by parents and police has to increase. And on speeding, too.

Whether alone or with others, most teenage drivers put themselves at risk because of unrealistic attitudes toward speed — which is a factor in 37% of teen deaths. A study of 2,310 15- to 18-year-olds in California showed that, on average, teens thought they were driving fast only if they were going about 90 mph.

In fact, with the rising popularity of NASCAR and such movies as The Fast and the Furious, which have inspired a renewed interest in street racing, things may get much worse before they get better. From Virginia to California, there are a growing number of teenage boys adding nitrous fuel systems and modified air intake systems to their cars to get them to hit absolute maximum speed. Street racing has posed such a problem in San Diego — 16 deaths and 31 serious injuries in 2002 — that a retired professor of public health at San Diego State University founded Racelegal, an organization that sponsors street-styled racing under controlled conditions at Qualcomm Stadium.

Ironically, speed may be the danger that parents can control most easily. There are many new GPS car-tracking devices that can inform parents where, how far and how fast kids are driving. Most tracking systems can be purchased for about $300.

I know that kids will be outraged if the driving age is raised, the passenger limits enforced and their speeding tendencies tracked by parents.

But when it comes to cars — the biggest source of death for American teens — parents have an obligation not to trust their kids and to do everything to save them from themselves.

Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.