Do we need stricter teen driving laws?
I just saw a Reader’s Digest (RD) report on teen driving. In it they show a breakdown of teenage vehicular fatalities by state (and they throw in some analysis of the “relevant” state laws). I look at the numbers here and I am quite encouraged. With over 300,000,000 people in this country we only have around 5,000 teenagers die in auto accidents every year. If you assume that about 5% of our population are “teenage drivers”, that gives you 5K deaths per 15M teen drivers (about 1 in 3,000 teens will die in car accidents). So far the data is encouraging, but that isn’t the conclusion RD wants me to come to.
Instead of just presenting the facts and letting them speak for themselves, RD takes this “study” a step further and concludes that weak state laws are to blame in states with high numbers of fatalities. They don’t show any sort of statistical rigor, they don’t even consider any other possible factors (rates of teenage drinking, driver’s ed curriculum, presence of public transportation, average miles driven by teens, etc). RD was far from thorough here, and yet they confidently conclude that “States with the strictest driving laws tend to have lower fatality rates.” Even their conclusion statement has some weasel words in it.
What really has me upset about this “study” is that they encourage readers to use this information to press state lawmakers for stricter driving laws. Look at the data they present. There are many examples of states with low fatality rates but weak driving laws (the inverse is true too). Just look at New Hampshire and Kentucky - just two examples showing that laws aren’t a good predictor of fatality rates.
I will admit that police fervently enforcing seatbelt laws will increase seatbelt wearing rates, but at what cost? Do we really want the state dictating our every move? Do you really want law enforcement officers to be able to stop anyone because they didn’t see the person in the backseat wearing a seatbelt? Don’t get me wrong I think that wearing seatbelts and driver’s education is extremely important, but using the police to scare people into driving safe is not the way to go about it. Education is always the best way to change behavior. As a nation we need to quit looking to the government to protect us from ourselves.
If you feel strongly about teen driving safety, how about lining up a speaker for your local high school? How about checking to see what the curriculum is for the driver’s education courses? How about finding (and donating) a video that can be shown to teens? How about doing something useful instead of wasting everyone’s time trying to change laws that have no effect. Laws aren’t the answer - action is.