As regular readers of this blog know, for almost two years I have been plugging away at two recurring themes: even the most sensible and well-trained teen drivers make mistakes that lead to crashes, and driving school education for teens provides the most basic level of instruction about how to handle a vehicle and the rules of the road, but does not come close to producing a safe driver.
I am grateful, therefore, for validation, in the form of other articles by experts and researchers who reinforce my point (and, in this case, I will concede, say it even better than I have). A few months ago, Sharon Carty, a veteran writer for autos.aol.com, http://autos.aol.com/author/sharon-silke-carty/, which is now part of the Huffington Post, called to chat about this blog. Two weeks ago, she produced an article entitled “Teen Drivers Making Common and Fatal Mistakes,” http://autos.aol.com/article/teen-drivers-making-common-and-fatal-mistakes/. The article begins with my son Reid and discusses this blog. It is excellent and insightful, and I highly recommend it.
The second article in Ms. Carty’s series, “Teen Driving: Think Driving Schools Make Safe Drivers? Think Again,” http://autos.aol.com/article/teen-driving-schools-safety/, covers in depth the evolution — or maybe I should say the collapse — of driver’s education in schools. She discusses the deficiencies in the current commercial enterprises that teach teens to drive, and the vast — though still largely counterintuitive — evidence that driver’s education does essentially nothing to reduce teen driver crash rates. I strongly recommend this second article as a partner to my September 15, 2009 post on the same subject.
I thank Ms. Carty for her excellent work, and encourage all to follow her continuing series.
And remember the basic message here: There are four realities of teen driving that teaching teens how to handle a car do not overcome: (1) the immaturity of their brains; (2) the fact that safer driving takes years, not hours, weeks, or months; (3) the impossibility of training teens for anywhere near the variety and complexity of situations they will face on the road; and (4) the fact that new drivers use a visual search pattern that encompasses the perimeter of the car (as they try not to hit anything), not the situation developing down the road, where trouble might lurk.
Good article. Would also like to add that another issue with teens is emotional immaturity. Those years when they change from children to adults bring many challenges emotionally with can affect their driving decisions. Driver’s education courses do not usually go into detail on this issue either.