California's tough "graduated driver licensing" law has been in effect for nearly a decade. It requires that drivers under 18 carry a learner's permit for at least six months before getting a provisional license, and that they practice driving with a parent or guardian during that period. For the first six months that they have the provisional license, teen drivers cannot drive passengers younger than 20 unless they are accompanied by a licensed driver 25 or older. Other severe restrictions apply, including rules about nighttime driving.
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Wrong way for teen drivers
California's strict law on licenses may not be making the roads safer for young people.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, February 03, 2008 Home Edition Opinion Part M Page 3 Editorial pages Desk 1 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Teen drivers: An article on California's graduated driver licensing law in the Jan. 27 Opinion section stated that teens under 18 have to wait six months before driving passengers younger than 20. The law now requires that teens wait a year.
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The law was designed to reduce the number of teen drivers killed or injured in www.aaa-calif.com%2fcorpinfo%2fguides%2fteens.aspx ">traffic accidents . Unfortunately, the latest data indicate that young people just getting their licenses are more likely to be killed in traffic crashes today than were those who started driving under the state's old, less-restrictive licensing system.
These unexpected results suggest that the safety experts may have gotten the teen-driving issue wrong, and that in fact it is not age but greater experience behind the wheel that makes older drivers safer than younger ones.
The latest statistics from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System show that the traffic-death rates among California drivers ages 16 to 21 who were subjected to the 1998 teen-driver law are 8% higher than among comparable drivers who got their licenses before the law went into effect. This finding, based on figures from 1994 through 2006, factors out the state's population changes, the 3% general increase in overall traffic-death rates and a one-year transition period after the law first applied to each age.
Is California's teen-driver law -- the nation's strictest and touted by safety experts as a national model -- really hazardous for the state's teen drivers?
A study I conducted raises that possibility. Published in the National Safety Council's Journal of Safety Research, it found, as did previous researchers, that California's graduated licensing law was associated with fewer fatalities among 16-year-old drivers (down 20% through 2005). But that reduction was more than offset by the increased death rate -- up 24% -- of 18-year-olds, whose driving records researchers have neglected to study. The latest figures also indicate higher-than-expected fatalities among drivers aged 19, 20 and 21 who were licensed under the new law. The death rates of 17-year-olds changed little.
