In general, Graduated Driver Laws (GDL) address these aspects of teen driving:

- minimum age for a learner’s permit and a license;
- required hours of on the road training;
- passenger restrictions;
- nighttime curfews;
- rules about electronic devices and texting;
- alcohol and drug use;
- seat belt rules; and
- penalties, fines, or suspensions (or a combination) for violators.

Right now, the federal government is establishing standards for state GDL as part of its implementation of the national transportation bill approved in the Summer of 2012. States will be able to apply for federal grants based on their current GDL or their willingness to improve their teen driver laws to meet these standards. So, this seems like the right time to pose the question: which parts of GDL are most important? is it possible to rank their effectiveness and thus prioritize the pieces? Here, a few thoughts on this subject:

Seat belts and alcohol can almost be regarded as in a separate category, because seat belts are essential for every driver, and drinking by 16 and 17 year olds is universally illegal. In other words, while these two components are plainly the most important to teen driver safety, strict laws are already in place in most states.

Based on no particular source, but rather years of reading studies and articles, I would rank the importance of the other GDL components, from most important to least important, as follows:

1. minimum learner’s permit and licensing age;
2. electronic device and texting bans;
3. passenger restrictions;
4. penalties for violators;
5. curfews;
6. required hours of on-the-road training.

Here is my reasoning:

Given the well-documented facts that the brains of teens are not fully developed to appreciate risk and danger, that it takes years to create a safe driver, and that Driver’s Ed only provides the bare essentials of how to operate a vehicle, it seems that whether states require 20, 40, 50, 100 or even 500 hours of on-the-road training doesn’t make a huge difference. Any parent who relies on these minimal numbers of hours as a guide to whether a teen will drive safely is mistaken.

Because nighttime driving is more dangerous than daytime, curfews play a role in teen driver safety, and every state should have a curfew, and earlier is better. However, I am not sure that there is a big difference between, say, a 10 PM or 11 PM curfew, especially if, as is the case in most states, there are exceptions to the curfew for things like school events and employment.

When we get to penalties for violations, we approach the things that seems to make a bigger difference. Simply put, license suspensions have proven to be more effective than monetary fines (and also fairer across the economic spectrum of families). If the consequence of a teen driver violating the law is nothing more than a monetary fine, the deterrence factor is likely minimal, especially, if the parents help pay the fine because they don’t want to interrupt their own convenience of having another driver in the house. License suspensions get everyone’s attention.

Which leaves us with the top three, my candidates for the most important parts of GDL: raising the minimum permit and license age, a total ban on electronic devices, and passenger restrictions. If, for example all states prohibited teens from getting a learner’s permit until they are 16 and half, and full/unrestricted license until age 18, we would unquestionably lower teen crash and fatality rates (I am of course putting aside the political feasibility of getting such restrictions passed by state legislatures). New Jersey’s highest-in the-nation minimum age has saved many lives. Since texting makes driving 23 times more dangerous, electronic device laws are critical to teen driver safety. Finally, many studies, including the recent AAA Foundation study, document how crash rates go up with every additional passenger in a teen driver’s car.

So, let me pose this conclusion as a thought for federal regulators compiling standards and parents considering where to focus their energies: Minimum permit and license age; electronic device bans and control, and passenger restrictions are the most important parts. If we focused our efforts on these three, we would be spending our time on the most effective ways to reduce crash rates. None of this is to suggest that road, hours, curfews, and penalties are inconsequential, but just that in the overall scheme, the top three are the ones most likely to prevent crashes.

My thanks to Juliet Pennington, Diana Dias, and the folks at the AAA Club of Southern New England for their profile of this blog, “A Dad’s devotion to teen driver safety,” published in the November 2012 issue of Horizons, their newsletter, http://www.aaahorizons.com/content.cfm?a=1366. I have already gotten a stream of emails from AAA members. I am told that this article was distributed in New Haven and Fairfield counties in Connecticut, in Rhode Island, and in New Hampshire. AAA of Southern New England is the largest club in the AAA federation. I am very grateful for this regional exposure for the blog.

Before I get to today’s topic, yes I intend to get back soon to ranking the effectiveness of the various facets of Graduated Driver Laws, the AAA Foundation study of passengers, and my model curriculum for a two hour safety class for parents of teen drivers. But first, a quick hit on another topic.

The recent AAA Foundation passenger study has many mind-boggling statistics. Among them is almost 9,600 deaths of 16 and 17 year old drivers nationally from 2005 to 2010. Embedded in this number, however, is the fact that almost two thirds of these fatalities, 65 percent, were boys. A recent article in The New York Times Sunday magazine about the work of Professor Susan Baker at Johns Hopkins University (she has spent her career studying the causes of accidental deaths) highlighted a similar finding in a study of 14,000 teen driver fatalities: among the 15 year old drivers who died, 38 percent of boys and girls were speeding, but among the 19 year olds, the percentage for female drivers dropped to 22 percent while the male percentage remained steady at 38 percent.

Baker’s proposed solution? Boys should get their licenses at a later age.

I have no doubt that this suggestion is politically infeasible (and no doubt the boys would scream about “sex discrimination!”), but part of my job here is to get parents of teen drivers thinking, and the thought I want to implant, if not already there, is the undeniable fact that male teen drivers are at greater risk than females. Parent supervision of boys, roughly speaking, needs to be twice what it is for girls.

Baker’s suggestion also points out one of the frustrating realities of teen driver laws: the statistics often show us how we can save tens of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries, but we are held back by politics, tradition, and under-appreciation of the risks of teen driving and the costs of crashes. We could save thousands of lives simply by raising the minimum driving age in every state to 17, or as Baker suggests, by delaying licensing of boys. It is clear, however, that these suggestions have little chance of ever becoming the law in any state.

We are left with what is feasible in addressing the significant difference in crash rates and fatalities between boys and girls, and I suppose that parents simply adopting the attitude of heightened supervision of boys is the place to start.