California teenagers are safer without teen passengers in the car
When I first got my California driver license as a 16-year-old, I was frustrated by the provisional license restrictions that make it illegal to drive anyone younger than 20 years old without a parent or legal guardian in the car. I figured, if the state of California trusts me to drive a car, why should they care who's in it? And, I thought, what's the point of saving up for a car and getting a license if you can't drive your friends around and have fun?
Well, teenage logic be damned, California lawmakers actually had good reasons for the restrictions they set. It is a well established fact that the risk of a crash increases significantly when teen drivers have other teens in the car. Someone who has had their license for less than a year still has a lot to learn about driving and still has to put more of their brain power into driving than does someone who has been driving for five or 10 years. Driving a car is such a complex mental activity that it takes quite a while before a driver can fully develop that "auto-pilot" mode in which everything just happens without focused thought. When you take a teen driver's inexperience and combine it with wild friends in the car who are vying for the driver's attention, the result is potentially deadly.
Now, a new pair of studies adds to our understanding of exactly why teen drivers are more likely to get in an accident when they have teen passengers, according to a news release by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The first, a survey of 198 teen drivers, found that those teenagers who are most likely to drive with multiple peer passengers described themselves as "thrill-seekers," reported that their parents were not strict, and didn't have a good understanding of the dangers of driving. That's not representative of all teenage drivers, but the study authors found that those characteristics are more common among teen drivers who drive with multiple passengers.
The other study had a bigger sample size: 677 teen drivers representative of the national population of teen drivers. All of the participants in this survey had been involved in an accident -- some had passengers in the car when the accident occurred, and some were driving alone. “Both male and female teen drivers with peer passengers were more likely to be distracted just before a crash as compared to teens who crashed while driving alone,” explained the author of the study, Dr. Allison Curry, who is also director of epidemiology at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention. “Among the teens who said they were distracted by something inside the vehicle before they crashed, 71 percent of males and 47 percent of females said they were distracted directly by the actions of their passengers,” Curry said.
The news release included some further details: "Additionally, the researchers found males with passengers were almost six times more likely to perform an illegal maneuver and more than twice as likely to drive aggressively just before a crash, as compared to males driving alone. Females rarely drove aggressively prior to a crash, regardless of whether they had passengers in the car."
The point of all this isn't to say that teen drivers suck. The study authors pointed out that most teens are serious and responsible about driving. The problem, they say, is that many teens don't even realize how dangerous having friends in the car could be. "Teen passengers can intentionally and unintentionally encourage unsafe driving," Dr. Jessica Mirman, another researcher behind the surveys, said. "Because it can be difficult for new drivers to navigate the rules of the road and manage passengers, it’s best to keep the number of passengers to a minimum for the first year.”
At Purves Insurance, we're always talking about how important it is to be prepared with CA car insurance that will fully cover you in any potential accident. It is just as important, however, for teens to do everything they can to minimize the risk of an accident, and that includes following the rules regarding teenage passengers. It sucks, we know... but in the grand scheme of things it's the safe, responsible thing to do.
-- By Jeremy Ogul
(Photo credit: au_tiger01 on Flickr, used here with permission according to a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)
