There still are places in this great country where teen-agers can legally get behind the wheel of a car before they're old enough to grow whiskers.
In Montana, a teen can get a learner's permit at 14 and a full driver's license when he turns 15.
In South Dakota, a student passing driver's ed can get a junior license three months after turning 14. Just think: One day, she's too young to watch a TV14-rated "Friends;" a few months later, she's zooming around town with her own cast of friends.
The argument long has been made that different regions have different needs. Driving the wide-open spaces of Montana or South Dakota may not court the same risks as negotiating the curvy, crowded city streets. And personalized transportation by horse, tractor, truck or car is as much a part of Western culture as the subway is in Manhattan.
Nonetheless, the thought of allowing an average 14-year-old to commandeer what amounts to a 2-ton killing machine is enough to make me long for the horse-and-buggy days.
Thankfully, the rest of America is traveling in the opposite direction. Each year, more states are raising the minimum driving age, introducing graduated licenses, lengthening curfews and, in some cases, restricting the number of passengers in a car driven by teen-agers.
Pennsylvania tightened up driving rules for teens two years ago. New Jersey's new requirements fully kicked in last week. In all, 34 states now have graduated licenses, giving young motorists privileges in stages and their parents a slightly easier night's sleep.
There's no mystery behind this trend. Forget school violence or drug abuse the No. 1 cause of teen-age deaths in the United States is driving accidents. Four million teens become new drivers each year, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that about half of them will be in an accident during their first 12 months on the road.
Makes you want to hide the car keys until they're 25.
An understandable impulse as the parent of teen-agers, I feel it myself but it turns out that the most effective way to grow a generation of safer drivers is to teach them how to be safer drivers.
Don't laugh. That's not as obvious as it sounds.
"In terms of teaching kids to drive, I think we're failing," says Paul Hubbard, president of Driving Dynamics, a company in Little Silver, N.J., that trains corporate salespeople in safe driving techniques.
Hubbard may be overdramatizing the situation, but his point is important: Time alone will not compensate for a teen-ager's hubris, immaturity and inexperience. Safe driving is not intuitive; it is learned.
Consider what's happened in Pennsylvania. One of the new requirements is that teens with learner's permits spend at least 50 hours driving with adult supervision before being tested for a junior license. In just a year, this requirement along with a new graduated license and a longer curfew reduced crashes caused by 16-year-old drivers by 27 percent and fatalities by an impressive 58 percent.
This sort of hands-on teaching used to happen in school-based driver's ed programs, but many have been confined to the classroom by budgetary restraints. Time behind the wheel with mom or dad has been the cheaper and, so far, the effective alternative.
But Pennsylvania hasn't (yet) emulated 17 other states and imposed passenger restrictions on teens. Across the river in New Jersey, a new driver under 17 can't take two friends to the mall without an adult in the car.
Kids detest this restriction, naturally, but for young drivers, passengers are distractions, and distractions can be deadly. In one study, the presence of just one passenger almost doubled the fatal crash risk compared with driving alone.
California was the first state to enact meaningful passenger restrictions. In the first year, deaths and injuries caused by 16-year-old drivers declined 23 percent. Even Texas has come aboard; for the first six months, a new driver may have no more than one passenger under 21 (besides family members). Can other states be far behind?
Here's the puzzle, though: For older drivers, passengers aren't safety risks at all. In fact, drivers over 30 "benefit by having other people in the car. (Fewer cell phone distractions, perhaps?)
Restricting passengers is an appealing short-term safety fix, but the larger challenge is how to train young people to operate a moving vehicle safely alone, and with a passel of friends in the car. That takes time, instruction, practice and the kind of investments few are willing to make.
More than a rite of passage, driving can be a hazardous pastime. Teens are not the only ones on the road, you know.
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