Young Drivers' License Plate Decals Roil Teens and Parents

June 8, 2010 — -- Every time 17-year-old Haley Callaway gets behind the wheel of her mother's silver Toyota, she is breaking New Jersey law.

With her mother's consent, Callaway refuses to comply with a new state statute that requires all probationary drivers under age 21 to affix a red decal to their license plates whenever they drive.

"It labels me as a minor," said Callaway. "Someone could stalk me in a parking lot, then follow me home."

Known as Kyleigh's Law -- named after Kyleigh D'Alessio, a 16-year-old New Jersey girl killed in a 2006 car accident that also ended the life of the teen driver and injured two others -- the decal mandate is New Jersey's first-in-the-nation attempt to make young drivers known to law enforcement by marking their vehicles.

But barely six weeks after taking effect, many say the 1-by-1½-inch red removable decals are worse than being branded by a scarlet letter. Fewer than half of the 250,000 young drivers covered by Kyleigh's Law have even bothered to purchase the decals, which cost $4 for a pair, and lawmakers in both houses of the state government have introduced bills to repeal the new law.

Some 6,000 teens die in car accidents nationwide each year, and studies show that drivers are most accident prone in their first two years on the road. So, nearly a decade ago, New Jersey instituted a Graduated Driver License program, with a curfew and limits on the number and ages of passengers who could be in a provisional driver's vehicle.

But while the program has reduced fatal accidents among 17-year-old drivers by 25 percent, police have struggled to enforce the law, finding it difficult to do anything but guess whether a young-looking motorist was breaking the law by driving after curfew or ferrying too many young passengers.

All but one state, North Dakota, has some variation of the Graduated Driver License program, and legislation is afoot in Washington that would standardize the GDL laws nationwide.

With Kyleigh's Law, New Jersey became the first to address the problem of enforcement by mandating the decals.

"We could not afford to lose one more teen to a car crash," said Pam Fischer, director of the state's division of highway traffic safety and chair of a commission that devised the decal law after studying the problem over six months.

The commission also recommended changes that became a companion law to Kyleigh's Law, moving the curfew on probationary drivers even earlier, to 11 p.m. from midnight, and imposing a single-minor passenger limitation.