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May 15, 2008
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At Risk Behind The Wheel: For Teens, Sober Isn't Enough


Gerald Barrett, all of 18, wrapped his car around a utility pole in Patterson and somehow lived to tell about it. He was one of the lucky ones. One week earlier, on Jan. 10, Christopher Calazzo, 16, crashed his 1999 Nissan Maxima and was killed. The car had been a Christmas present from his parents. In recent years another teen lost control on a steep hill in Mahopac and was killed. A 15-year-old boy was impaled in Clarkstown while riding in the back seat of his teenage buddy's Dodge. A Bedford teen flipped his speeding Jeep, killing a 17-year-old passenger.

More than 5,000 teenagers are expected to die in traffic accidents nationwide this year - about two-thirds of them while behind the wheel. It is the No. 1 cause of death among U.S. teens. About one-quarter of them will be legally drunk. But most will die because they were driving too fast, or were distracted by too many friends in the car, or were simply still learning to drive. The bottom line, experts say, is that stopping teens from drinking and driving no longer may be enough to save their lives. "You can be perfectly sober and try to operate a crane and not be able to do a good job just because you don't know how to do it," said Robert Sinclair, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of New York. "It's the same kind of situation. Our youngsters don't know well how to operate a motor vehicle, and we're seeing the end result of it. It's the largest public health crisis about which very little or nothing is being done."

Preventing teen drunken driving is just the start. People ages 15 to 20 account for 8.5 percent of the U.S. population and 8.2 percent of New York's population. They also make up 6.3 percent of all licensed drivers nationally and 5.2 percent in the state. Yet they account for 12.9 percent of drivers involved in fatal crashes nationwide and 11 percent statewide, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. New York drivers ages 16 to 20 were involved in 38,689 accidents in 2005, the latest year available from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Of those, 201 were fatal. The department's 2004 statistics show nearly 3,400 accidents among drivers ages 16 to 20 in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties that year. Injuries occurred in 2,214 of them, with fatalities in 13. And the reality is as numbing as the numbers.

"What you have is a risk taker," said Tom Louizo, regional administrator of the eastern region of the traffic safety administration. "He's a young driver who's inexperienced in a vehicle and maybe driving a vehicle that handles differently. They're out at high-risk times, high-risk behaviors. That all adds to this."

Alcohol consumption is clearly a factor in too many teen accidents. But it is not the overriding cause, and it becomes more of a statistical factor when teens reach the legal drinking age of 21. An analysis of 2004 data by the traffic safety administration found that alcohol consumption was a factor in 13 percent of 16-year-old driver fatalities and 25 percent for 17- to 19-year-olds. The analysis determined that driver error was at fault in 78 percent of the 16-year-old fatalities, and speeding was a factor 39 percent of the time. And there were more than three occupants in the vehicle 29 percent of the time. For 17- to 19-year-olds, driver error was blamed 69 percent of the time, while having three or more occupants was a factor 24 percent of the time. It generally can be boiled down to carelessness and inexperience.

Many teens simply haven't gotten comfortable behind the wheel yet, said Dennis Doverspike, a psychology professor at the University of Akron in Ohio who specializes in driving behavior. "For most of the country, where probably almost every adult drives, driving seems like a very routine kind of behavior," he said. "But actually if you analyze it, driving is a very complex task, probably one of the most complex things we do in our lives." Doverspike said the same could be true for older new drivers, whose inexperience makes it more challenging to react to unexpected situations and typical distractions that many experienced drivers grow accustomed to. "We talk about automatizing a task, which just means you don't have to think about it anymore," he said. "When you first ride a bicycle you have to think about it. After a while you don't have to think about it. And when you first drive a car, you have to think about it." Teens could run an even higher risk of driving accidents because they tend to be more carefree and less likely to follow rules as a group, Doverspike said. For instance, the traffic safety administration found that 62 percent of 15- to 20-year-olds killed in accidents were not wearing seat belts, compared with 55 percent for all ages. But despite changes in state law to increase training, teens remain short on experience when they take to the roads.

An unofficial telephone survey by The Journal News found that only about half of the school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley offer driver education courses. Commercial driving schools run most, if not all, of them and are as active as ever, thanks to a 2003 change in New York law that requires more supervised driving instruction and extra classroom time to qualify sooner for an unrestricted license. A report released last month by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that states with similar graduated driver licensing programs had 38 percent fewer fatal crashes involving 16-year-old drivers. But Sinclair of the Automobile Club said it still isn't enough. "Driver training for youngsters in our country is a bad joke," he said. "At best it's driver's ed, and a lot of times that gets cut anytime a municipality has some sort of budget crunch."  "When we compare driver training for youngsters compared to new drivers in, say, Europe, we fall far, far behind."

Responsibility ultimately falls on parents, both for driver training and to address potentially lethal behavior behind the wheel, said Steven Wallace, chairman of Students Against Destructive Decisions, or SADD. "We sort of need to take back the turf, and we need to sit with our kids and we need to talk with them about this issue and do it on a regular basis in normal conversation," Wallace said. "Our research shows that when we do that they are overwhelmingly less likely to make poor choices." Despite the various factors that contribute to teen driving fatalities, Wallace said, it should begin with an honest discussion about drinking and driving. But don't stop there, he said. Then maybe next time a young driver like Gerald Barrett won't need to be lucky. 

Drunk driving is a crime. More importantly, it is not a victimless crime. Nearly 17,000 Americans are killed and more than 700,000 are injured each year in alcohol related traffic crashes.

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