The right driving age
(One in a series on America's car culture.)
FOR ELDERLY drivers, cars are often a means to escape isolation and depression. For teenagers, licenses represent nothing short of liberty. But car keys are often a cocked weapon in the hands of many drivers at the extreme ends of these accident-prone age groups. Policy makers need to set stricter limits on the state's youngest and oldest drivers and live with the political consequences.
In Massachusetts, roughly one-third of 16-year-old drivers are involved in serious crashes, according to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Nature as well as inexperience may be at work. A National Institutes of Health study last year showed that the brain of a 16-year-old is not well developed in the area responsible for impulse control. Parents can elicit promises from their teens to drive responsibly, but they can't stimulate the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the so-called executive branch of the brain that weighs risks.
Sixteen-year-old drivers crash at three times the rate of novice 17-year-old drivers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Alcohol, as a rule, is not the major factor, playing a role in just 13 percent of fatal crashes. Yet no state places an outright ban on driving by 16-year-old ''junior operators." Instead, more than 30 states employ a ''graduated driver licensing" system for 16- and 17-year-olds. In Massachusetts, for example, they are prohibited from driving during the first six months with passengers under the age of 18, a sensible way to limit distractions. But other aspects of the law are ill-considered. For example, junior operators must be off the road from midnight to 5 a.m., while National Safety Council data point to the 9 p.m. to midnight period as the time of highest risk for teen accidents and fatalities.
A bill in the Legislature proposes to double the number of hours, from six to 12, that novices must spend with a professional driving school instructor. Such an increase should help new drivers learn the rules of the road. But standard driver's-ed instruction lacks both the experts and terrain to teach panic stops, emergency lane changes, skid control, and drills to avoid tailgaters -- precisely the skills that novice drivers need to stay safe. Such instruction, called advanced driver training, is available from skilled race car drivers. But the service isn't cheap at roughly $300 for a half-day training session.
On a recent school vacation day, 20 teen drivers paired off with professional race car drivers from the In Control advanced driver training school on a windy runway at the former Naval Air Station in South Weymouth. Several of the students already knew about the pain caused by the roughly 3,500 deadly crashes involving 16-to-19-year-old drivers in the United States each year: They were classmates of the two sisters from Southborough -- 17-year-old Shauna Murphy and 15-year-old Meghan -- who died in October after their Land Rover crashed into a utility pole. Although some students had barely been on the road for weeks, they learned quickly, and at high speeds, how to use antilock brakes and steering techniques to avoid sudden hazards. Parents looked on nervously as their teens climbed into Nissan sedans with their instructors and navigated through traffic cones. Brandon Bogart, a professional race car driver and chief operating officer of In Control, suggested parents should be more worried about the SUVs in their own driveways, which are notoriously hard for novices to control.
Executives at the Cooperative Insurance Companies of Vermont believe in advanced driving training so strongly that they offer to pay for half the course and to give a 10 percent discount on premiums to young drivers who complete it. Yet a proposal in Massachusetts to allow insurance companies to offer graduates a 5 percent discount is hung up while the Registry considers how to certify and monitor the courses. Both legislators and insurers, at least, are devising a study to measure the effectiveness of advanced driver training. If the numbers are as promising as expected, 16-year-olds should be required to take advanced driver training or wait until age 17 to drive.
Bogart believes that proper training can counteract judgment deficits in teens. He fears that many elderly drivers, however, lack the reaction time to learn how to control their cars in an emergency. The problem is most acute for drivers over the age of 75, the only group with higher driver fatality rates than 16-year-olds, according to a US Department of Transportation study. Medical journals are full of descriptions of visual impairment, foot abnormalities, musculoskeletal disorders, hearing difficulties, and other challenges facing elderly drivers. Yet Massachusetts requires only a vision test for anyone renewing their license, regardless of age, every five years. Many drivers, including the elderly, can elude even that test for as much as a decade by exercising a loophole allowing mail-in renewal every other license period.
The political clout of the elderly is such that lawmakers aren't likely to act on studies showing that periodic road testing of elderly drivers can reduce crashes. Even requiring the elderly to renew their licenses more frequently than younger drivers meets with resistance. For the health of both the elderly and the general public, however, a sensible solution would require drivers over the age of 65 to take a road test every five years. One alternative proven to reduce crashes would be to require that physicians report patients with serious driving impairments, regardless of age, to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, which would then conduct a lottery for road tests. Pennsylvania officials have found that such a system captures mainly elderly drivers without creating much political resistance.
When it's time to get behind the wheel, young reflexes don't mean much without experience. Likewise, decades of driving experience count for little without physical skills. Lawmakers need to follow the data on dangerous drivers, even if the facts them into politically tight spaces. 