Curbs on young drivers have bad side effect

Teens “learn well and react well,” said Jean Shope, from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

Figuring out the best way to start them driving, she said, is “quite challenging. If we want teens to get driving experience while they’re teens, we have to face the fact that they are teenagers and still have development issues going on.”

Car crashes account for more than one-third of deaths in US teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are the leading cause of death for that age group.

Starting in 1996, states began putting restrictions on drivers under 18, including on what hours they could take the wheel (not after midnight, for example) and who they could have as a passenger (no more than one other teenager). Now, every state has some degree of graduated driver-licensing program.

To test their effect on all teen drivers, researchers led by Scott Masten from the California Department of Motor Vehicles combined data on fatal crashes in adolescents ages 16 to 19 between 1986 and 2007.

On the whole, fewer teens died in car crashes when stricter driving policies were in place. With no driving restrictions, about 47 of every 100,000 teens died in a car crash every year, on average. With strict programs, including both nighttime driving and passenger restrictions, that decreased to 30 in every 100,000 per year.