Along with its recent report on the increase in the first six months of 2012 in 16 and 17 year old driver fatalities, the Governor’s Highway Safety Administration has updated its national survey of the minimum age in state laws for a teen to obtain a learner’s permit, and then a driver’s license.
As long as I have been writing this blog, one of my core themes has been the idea that There Is No Such Thing As a Safe Teen Driver, with the first and most important of the four reasons for this being that the human brain does not fully develop until we reach about age 22 to 25, and the part of the brain that provides judgment and restraint is the last part to develop. Thus, I have argued again and again, minimum ages for teen drives, if they were based on science instead of politics, parent convenience, and tradition, would be at least 21 if not 24 or 25, and certainly not 16 or 17.
So I was somewhat caught off guard to be reminded by GHSA’s recent update that in 39 states, the minimum age for getting a learner’s permit is less than 16, and in four states it is under age 15. For a driver’s license, 5 states license teens at between 14 years, six months and 16, and then 34 states allow the license on a teen’s 16th birthday. Only one state, New Jersey, has a minimum age of 17 (and that state has a substantial reduction in crash rates as a result).
On this blog I have written previously about the fact that when I served on a Connecticut task force that overhauled our teen driver laws in 2007-08, we got letters from teens saying that the answer to the multiple-fatality crashes that Connecticut had experienced was: to lower the driving age, “so when teens reach age 16, they will be more experienced drivers.” At the time, I and other task force members dismissed this thought as a backward way to approach teen driving laws and policies. The GHSA report, however, has reminded me that 39 states allow exactly what those letter writers advocated, perhaps not for the precise reason stated, but allow nonetheless.
The point to be reiterated for parents of teen drivers (other than trotting down to your legislature and advocating for a higher minimum age for permits and licenses) is that the more lenient your state’s teen driver law is, the more responsibility you have to supervise and control your teen driver. This is especially true for the minimum age requirements for learner’s permits and driver’s licenses.
