Inexperienced, distracted, deadly

It’s easy, sometimes too easy and often unfair, to pick on teen drivers. Many (probably most) of the rudest, most inept, most clueless and/or most homicidally aggressive drivers are well beyond their high school years.

Unfortunately, now is a particular time — a time of the year, and a point on our social and technological timeline — when critical scrutiny of our youngest drivers’ tendencies is literally of life-or-death importance.

A new report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reinforces what anecdotal evidence, our own driving experience and the forensic analyses of too many highway tragedies have told us already: Almost 60 percent of vehicle crashes involving teen drivers involve some kind of distraction — the most dangerous, of course, being cell phone use, especially when it involves reading and sending text messages.

And this is the season when those crashes are most likely to happen: Over the last five years, AAA reports, about 1,000 people a year have died in crashes involving teen drivers during the summer months alone — that out-of-school stretch after Memorial Day that AAA has grimly dubbed the “100 deadliest days.”

The two most obvious factors that make teen drivers especially vulnerable, and especially hazardous for everybody else on the road, are their relative inexperience as drivers, and youth’s optimistic but ever-perilous illusion of immortality. The air-conditioned, music-enhanced comfort of an automobile can lull even a veteran driver into forgetting, if just for the moment it takes for an accident to happen, that this “living room” is a couple of tons of metal hurtling along at a high — often too high — rate of speed.

During the summer vacation season, the AAA report notes, an average of 10 people a day — a day — are killed in the U.S. as the result of a motor vehicle accident involving a teen driver, and most of those accidents involve driver distraction.

Here are some other scary statistics in, or related to, the AAA report:

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data collected between 2007 and 2014 indicate that the reported percentage of young drivers seen manipulating a hand-held device at the wheel quadrupled. Texting and driving increases the crash risk by a factor of 23, according to the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

And all this scary math isn’t just about a parent’s worst nightmare: "Nearly two-thirds of people injured or killed in crashes involving a teen driver,” said AAA’s Jennifer Ryan, “are people other than the teens themselves."

State legislatures have begun cracking down on mobile phone use by drivers. Both Georgia and Alabama prohibit all cell phone use by novice drivers, and text messaging by all drivers. (If ever there’s been a public safety no-brainer …)

But clearly there needs to be a major societal shift in both attitudes and laws, the way there has been about drunk driving. Many experts insist, with credible statistical evidence, that texting at the wheel is actually a worse public safety hazard than DUI. Distracted-driving laws with more teeth might mean less highway carnage.

This story was originally published June 1, 2016 at 3:20 PM with the headline "Inexperienced, distracted, deadly."