Keeping Teens Safe on the Road

Feb. 13, 2005 -- -- For some people concerned about highway safety, the key to getting teenagers to drive more responsibly is to take away the gadgets that distract them from the road; others, though, say more technology is just the way to keep them thinking about what they're doing behind the wheel.

Lawmakers in more than a dozen states are considering bills to ban cell phone use by teenaged drivers -- even the hands-free phones that are allowed in places where using hand-held phones is illegal for drivers of any age.

At the same time, marketers are pushing GPS technology as a tool for parents to keep tabs on their teen drivers, touting the technology's ability to alert parents when a car is driven faster than a designated speed or outside of a designated area.

"It's almost like having a parent in the back seat," said James Sapp of Atlanta, who markets GPS tracking systems directed at parents concerned about their teenagers' driving. "If the kids in the back seat are saying, 'Let's see what this baby can do,' the kid's going to go, 'If I do that, my dad's going to know. He's liable to take the car away from me for a month.' "

That of course assumes that parents are ready to make that kind of a threat, and follow through with the punishment.

For James Winfield, who runs the DriveHomeSafe.com Web site from his Salem, Ore., home, the answer for concerned parents is less about technology and more about taking a common sense approach. He tells parents to talk to their kids more, pay closer attention to how they drive and how they behave in cars, and not to assume that because their children have passed their driver's test they are ready for anything on the road.

That the problem needs attention is obvious from a look at statistics regarding teenagers and driving. Though teen driving deaths have declined over the last 30 years, teenagers still die in cars at higher rates than any other group, and auto accidents are by far the leading killer of children.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, teenagers accounted for 10 percent of the population and 15 percent of the motor vehicle occupant fatalities in 2003. Of all the teenagers who died in car crashes, 59 percent died in cars driven by other teenagers, and another 21 percent died in cars driven by people 20 to 24 years old.

Safe-driving experts blame this on two factors -- teenagers' inexperience as drivers, and their readiness to take risks behind the wheel, when older drivers know better.

The difficulty may be that the problem, according to many psychologists, is based in biology. The way teenagers' brains are wired, they are just more inclined to irrational, irresponsibly risky behavior.

That's because the last section of the brain to develop is the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that's responsible for planning, organizing and anticipating the consequences of one's actions. The development of that part of the brain might not be complete until a person is 25 or even older, according to Elizabeth Sowell, a neurophysiologist at UCLA. Sowell's research has been cited by Virginia lawmakers who are pushing a teen driver cell phone ban.

According to a recent study by University of Utah psychologists, talking on a cell phone of any kind slowed teenagers' reaction times to speeds comparable with those of a person in their late 60s or early 70s. The study also found that the impairment caused by the distraction of talking on a cell phone is equal to that caused by a blood-alcohol level of more than 0.08.

In Maryland, lawmakers are going further than their counterparts in other states, proposing a bill that would not only ban cell phones, but limit the number of passengers who can ride with a teen driver.

"The studies point to the fact that teens are taking the highest risk because in some respects the brains don't know any better," said William Bronrott, a Democratic legislator representing Montgomery County in Maryland's House of Delegates.

Researchers at Temple University have found evidence supporting the need for such a measure. They found that for teen drivers, the risk of a crash doubles with just one extra passenger.

"Interestingly, the teenagers didn't take more risks when they were by themselves," said Lawrence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple, which is in Philadelphia. "It was only when they were in the presence of other kids."

In New Hampshire, lawmakers are considering a bill like that in Virginia to take cell phones away from teenagers while they're driving.

"This bill is just another way of trying to make sure that our youth learn how to drive before we allow them to get these kind of distractions," said Rep. Michael Scanlon, who sponsored the bill.

Perhaps surprisingly, some high school students say they support the measure. Casey McDaniel, a high school student from Portsmouth, admitted that she rear-ended another car because she was distracted while using her cell phone.

But even other students who hadn't already gotten in an accident agreed that talking on the phone while driving may be a bad idea.

"I don't think it's safe to talk on the phone like that and drive because you don't know what is going on," Portsmouth High School student Alex Anthony said.

But of course what teenagers say and what they do are not always the same thing.

Winfield of DriveHomeSafe.com remembered how when his son was a teenager, they had an agreement that the boy would not drive with other teenagers in the car. Whenever Winfield or his wife asked the boy, he said he never had his friends in the car. But then one day Winfield happened to see his son driving, and he was not alone in the car, he said.

They worked out an agreement with their children about the rules for their teenagers' driving, and they kept tabs on them in various ways, including both riding in the car with them driving and driving to the same place in separate cars, with no adults in the car with the teenager.

Technology like GPS tracking devices could be a help, Winfield said, but he doesn't think it is a replacement for a more human approach.

"The bottom line is the relationship between parents and teenagers, because in the end if teenagers are not respectful of their parents' authority, the teenager may persist in the behavior that is dangerous," he said. "If the kids don't respect you, the technology isn't going to do you much good."