Graduated licensing is cutting the carnage, new studies find

The idea took hold in the early 1990s. The premise was that if you forced teenagers to pass a series of hurdles before they were granted a full driver's licence — such as limits on when they could drive or how many friends they could have in the car — it would cut the accident rate for this particularly vulnerable group.

And so far the premise is holding up.

A study released earlier this week by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U.S. found that states with strong graduated licensing rules saw an 18 per cent decrease in the rate of fatal crashes involving 16-year-olds compared with a decade earlier.

Adding to the evidence that graduated licensing works, states with the most stringent requirements saw fatal crash rates for the youngest drivers drop by 21 per cent.

This is good news, especially because graduated licensing has taken hold in at least 40 U.S. states and every Canadian province, at least to some degree. But it's not the full story. Teen drivers, especially boys, continue to crash at substantially higher rates than adults, a fact that shows up in insurance rates.

What's more, July and August are the two worst months for cars and teen fatalities.

Also, as another recent study by the Ottawa-based Traffic Injury Research Foundation points out, some elements of graduated licensing clearly work better than others. Drivers' education programs aren't the panacea most parents want them to be, this study suggests. More important are curfews, a prohibition on peer passengers, at least in the learning years, and above all, more parental supervision.

What works

The Canadian study, which was carried out on behalf of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and was released in late June, compared the graduated licensing systems in Oregon and Ontario as well as with Oregon and B.C., to see which elements of each were most effective.

All three jurisdictions had, at the time of the study in 2002, different aspects of the graduated system. As a result, the study was able to suggest that Ontario, with its later entry stage for novice drivers (16 years of age, compared with 15 in Oregon) and longer learner period (12 months requiring an adult driver in the car), had the better training system for the youngest drivers.

This was borne out in the crash numbers, though by the time drivers graduated to the intermediate stage, at 17 and 18, Ontario teens were getting into just as many collisions as their Oregonian counterparts. The saving grace, if you can call it that, was that only about half as many Ontario crashes involving teens were serious enough to involve injury or death, compared with the Oregon rate.

At the time of the study, Oregon had much stricter rules than Ontario regarding curfews for teen drivers and how many peer passengers could be in the car during the restricted period. (According to the National Highway study, a teen driver's risk of dying more than doubles with two or more male passengers in the car.)

As a result, the Canadian researchers were able to suggest that these rules work and these were conditions associated with lower crash rates. The study's main recommendations are:

• A 16-year-old minimum for a learner's permit and much longer supervised training (up to 100 hours) than can be found in most jurisdictions.
• Nighttime driving prohibition beginning as early as 9 or 10 p.m. during the restricted or intermediate stage as well as limits on the number of teen passengers when a young driver is unsupervised.
• More parental involvement in the learning and supervisory experience, as well as in setting a good example.

On Drivers' Ed.

One of the more perplexing findings in the Canadian study was that increased practice, at least in the formal driving-school sense, was not directly linked to a reduction in collisions. The study found that teens who had accidents actually had more driving practice as learners than their collision-free counterparts.

The researchers speculate that perhaps this is because some of these young people just didn't have an aptitude for driving and that even 50 or 100 hours of training was not enough to overcome that. But as you read further, other possible reasons emerge.

For example, in B.C. at that time, teens who took driving lessons could substantially reduce the number of months they had to remain at the supervised learner's level, before getting out on their own. These lessons also may have given their parents a false sense of confidence in their teens' driving abilities, and perhaps an excuse not to set strict rules that might cause an argument every time the family car is loaned out.

The Canadian researchers found that teens who completed drivers' courses or safety education programs at school had, on average, significantly fewer hours behind the wheel than others before obtaining their intermediate licences.

There are many factors why teens, teenage boys especially, get into more accidents than adult drivers — everything from peer pressure and thrill-seeking to reaction times and immature judgment.

More and more, scientists who plumb the inner-workings of the human mind report that the teenage brain is definitely a work in progress and that the prefrontal lobes, where decision-making and forward-thinking are said to reside, are still developing during these critical hormone-enriched years.

But the inescapable conclusion, from accident studies such as these, is that when it comes to getting a driver's licence, there is no substitute for a long, careful learning period, over a variety of different conditions.