Programs & Labs
Subhead H2
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Graduated licensing, parental involvement improve teen driving
Bruce Simons-Morton
Inexperience is the root of the young driver problem—and the most promising ways to solve it are graduated licensure and more effective parent involvement, said Bruce Simons-Morton at the CTS Winter Luncheon on February 8.
Simons-Morton is the chief of the Prevention Research Branch in the Division of Epidemiology, Statistics, and Prevention Research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.
“Crash rates are extremely elevated for newly licensed drivers,” Simons-Morton said. The rate in the first two weeks of driving is 20 times higher than it is six months later, and even after two years of driving, it is double of those aged 25–35. (A similar pattern exists for novice drivers at any age.)
Conventional wisdom blames much of the problem on the risk-taking behavior of teens, Simons-Morton said, but studies indicate inexperience and lack of exposure to real-road conditions play a much bigger role. The crash rate picture looks very similar to the learning curves of other activities such as golfing or learning a new language—errors decrease with practice. With driving, however, other factors—rare events, complexity, and cognitive capacity—affect the error rate.
For adults, driving in a snowstorm is an example of a rare event (and each year, drivers need to relearn how to do it). For novice drivers, night driving is still a rarity. Even though the young have better visual acuity, Simons-Morton said, they lack experience to judge night conditions and have a much higher crash rate compared with other drivers.
Complexity increases with passengers, speed, and secondary tasks. When teen drivers have three or more passengers aged 16–17, for example, the fatal crash rate more than doubles. Gender also matters: With a male passenger, male teens drive more than 5 mph faster than traffic, but with a female passenger they stay with the flow. Teens also seem less able to gauge unsafe speeds and self-impose limits on cell phone use.
Moreover, learning to drive itself demands substantial cognitive capacity. (Alcohol impairment is a prime example of diminished cognitive capacity.)
The dilemma, Simons-Morton explained, is that driving proficiency and performance improve mainly with unsupervised driving experience, but experience increases exposure and risk. “This is doubly true for teens.”
One solution is greater use of graduated driver’s licenses (GDLs). Used in many states, GDLs impose limits on night driving, passengers, and other behaviors. Substantial evidence shows GDLs improve the safety of independent driving, he said.
Another solution is more effective parent management. Risky driving declines when parents set limits—and some limits are better than others, Simons-Morton said. For example, parents commonly require teens to obtain permission before driving and to leave their destination and return time. “But these limits have no effect on safety,” he said, “and mainly serve to ease parents’ worry.”
What’s more effective is limiting night driving, passengers, and the types of roads novices can use (to those under 55 mph). “[Parents’] hearts are in the right place,” he said, “but they don’t know what to do, and they don’t do it long enough.”
To provide guidance, Simons-Morton’s office has developed the Checkpoints Program, which includes a video, newsletter, and sample driving agreement for parents and teens. With this simple intervention, teens report less risky driving; both parents and teens view it positively. (For more about Checkpoints, see www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/despr/studies/driving/checkpoints.cfm.)
“Checkpoints proved that it is feasible to improve parent management,” Simons-Morton said. One impediment, however, is parent ambivalence: parents are eager to end the “tedium of chauffeuring teens,” he said. They may also overestimate their teens’ maturity or prefer to avoid conflict with them. He recommends parents find a balance between safety and mobility.
On a broader level, Simons-Morton believes change is needed in cultural norms and social expectations. “Teen driving should be seen as a privilege, not a right,” he concluded. “It would seem appropriate to restrict driving privileges for a time while they gain experience.”
The luncheon was sponsored by the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Institute at CTS. Institute director Max Donath, who introduced the presentation, and his research team are also conducting research on teen driving (www.its.umn.edu/research/projectdetail.pl?id=2004057).