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Death risk for teen drivers soars when other teens ride, study shows
CHICAGO (CNN) -- The risk of a teen-age driver dying in a car crash increases when he shares the ride with other young people, according to a study reported Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Li-Hui Chen, Ph.D., from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, and colleagues, studied national traffic data for fatal accidents. They found these death rates per 10 million trips for 16-year-old drivers:
The death risk for drivers, no matter what their sex of what time of the day they were driving, went up markedly when they had passengers, the researchers found. Overall, male drivers were at greater risk.
Chen and her associates found that driver deaths per 1,000 crashes increased for 16- or 17-year-olds transporting male passengers or passengers younger than 30 years. In contrast, 30- to 59-year-old drivers who carried passengers had decreased death rates.
“Why were there more deaths when 16- and 17-year-old drivers carried passengers?” the authors asked. Previous research of 192 high-school drivers, they said, points to specific dangerous driving behaviors strongly associated with peers – driving after drinking alcohol or using drugs, speeding, swerving, crossing the highway center line, tire skidding and running red lights.
In calling for a three-tiered system of licensing teen drivers, the researchers noted that motor-vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among American teen-agers. Thirty-six percent of all deaths of youths 15 to 19 years old occurs because of motor-vehicle collisions.
The fatal-crash rate per million miles for 16-year-old drivers is more than seven times the rate for drivers 30 to 59 years, they reported.
By January, 24 of the 50 states had adopted graduated licensing systems with three stages. The premise of these systems is that beginning drivers should earn a full license in phases. During the first step, new drivers can operate cars only under supervision.
In the second step, which varies among the states, young drivers face such restrictions as no night driving. In nine of the 24 states, restrictions exist on teen-age drivers carrying passengers.
Rates of teen traffic crashes increase after 10 p.m. and rise even more dramatically after midnight.
"It's pretty clear that states should not let them drive later at night for a while and not let them drive with teen passengers,'' said Robert Foss of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center.
Foss, who wrote and editorial in the journal accompanying Chen's report, advocates a 10 p.m. curfew.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded the study. The analyzed information was from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and General Estimates (1992-97) and from the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (1995).
RELATED SITES:
Journal of the American Medical Association
Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey
Fatality Analysis Reporting System
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
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