Teen Driving: The #1 Focus for Data-Driven ParentsFist posted on Calvert Education blog May 3, 2014 at http://bit.ly/1kFJFZJ

If I asked you to name the #1 way children die from accidents (e.g., falls, poisoning) from birth all the way through age 19, you’d probably say car accidents—and you would be right. Nearly one third of all the accidental deaths of children in the US are from motor vehicle accidents.  But did you know that MOST of those accidents are because of a teen behind the wheel? About one in five or 20% of the deadly accidents across our children’s lives are due to teen drivers. This is one of the reasons why the government estimated that students are about fifty times more likely to arrive at school alive if they take the bus than if they drive themselves or ride with friends.[iii] 

All the other motor vehicle accidents—those without teen drivers but someone birth to 19 dies—don’t even come close to the total number of deaths from teens driving.  The non-teen accidents are only about 14% of deaths (see graphic).

Causes: Inexperience and the Teenage Brain

After studying teen crashes, the Centers for Disease Control concluded that “the main cause of teen crashes is driver inexperience.”[iv] Teen driver error, as opposed to vehicle or environmental factors, accounts for nearly all of the accidents.[v] And this is not because teens simply log more hours on the road on average than other drivers; per mile driven, teen drivers are three to four times more likely than drivers age twenty and older to be in a fatal crash.[vi],[vii]

And the teen driver inexperience interacts with the teenage brain, notable for its susceptibility to peer influence, poor perception of risk, and high emotionality, all of which have been cited as major crash factors.[viii] Nurture Shock concludes that some teenagers are simply “wired” to take big risks and have particularly difficult times in the early stages of driving because of the cognitive load:

“Teenage drivers can score 100% on a paper test of the rules, but when driving, their reaction times are delayed because they have not yet internalized the grammar of driving—they have to think about it. This increases the cognitive load, and their ability to maintain attention is stressed to capacity. They are on the verge of making poor decisions. Put a friend in the car and attention systems are easily overloaded—the driver’s brain no longer proactively anticipates what could happen, glancing seconds ahead and preloading the rules. Instead, he is left to react, and can’t always react accurately, no matter how fast his reflexes are.”[ix]

Some other important facts about teen drivers:

• Teens have the lowest rate of seat belt use among children. In 2011, only 54 percent of high school students reported that they always wear seat belts when riding with someone else.[x]
• A typical teen sends and receives about a hundred text messages a day, and 58 percent of high school seniors admit to texting while driving.[xi]
• The presence of teen passengers increases the crash risk of unsupervised teen drivers, and this risk increases with the number of teen passengers.[xii] Nearly two out of three teen crash deaths that involve sixteen-year-old drivers happen when a new driver has one or more teen passengers.[xiii]
• Although young drivers are actually less likely than adults to drive after drinking alcohol, their crash risk is substantially higher when they do (the interaction with inexperience).[xiv] Nearly one-quarter (22 percent) of fatal teen crashes in 2010 involved a teen driver who had been drinking.

Most crashes happen during the first year, particularly the first few months.

Not surprisingly then, newly licensed teens are particularly at risk. Most crashes happen during the first year a teen has a license,[xv] and crash risk is particularly high during the first months of licensure.[xvi],[xvii]

The good news here is that training and practice are effective countermeasures. As the CDC notes, “There are proven methods to helping teens become safer drivers. Research suggests that the most comprehensive graduated driver licensing (GDL) programs are associated with reductions of 38 percent and 40 percent in fatal and injury crashes, respectively, among sixteen-year-old drivers…[GDL] systems are designed to delay full licensure while allowing teens to get their initial driving experience under low-risk conditions.”[xviii]  GDL programs usually restrict night-time driving, cell phone usage, and passengers (e.g., no other teens), while encouraging through permitting extensive driving experience through minimum hours. To read about your state’s GDL and related safety laws, check out the Governors’ Highway Safety Association’s page: http://www.ghsa.org/html/stateinfo/bystate/index.html.

The one-sentence take-away: Get teens as much driving practice as possible, without other children or distractions in the car, before they are on their own.