Jackson Free Press

A new study from the National Youth Rights Association disputes the perception that teens are reckless behind the wheel. The study, which analyzed fatal traffic accidents in California from 1995-2004, found that teen drivers are no more dangerous behind the wheel than middle-aged adults when socioeconomic status is taken into account.

This contradicts widely held views of teens as dangerous drivers, along with studies such as one produced by the American Automobile Association this January. That study, entitled "Teen Crashes: Everyone Is at Risk," accused teen drivers of killing more than 30,000 people with irresponsible driving. Teens kill "husbands, mothers, brothers, children, and grandmothers ... everyone is at risk," the study warned. Media reports routinely portray teens as too immature to drive, spinning fanciful theories about teen brain development. Some experts, such as Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health, have even proposed raising the age at which Americans can drive and vote to 25.

In contrast to this spectre of killer teens, the NYRA study found that poverty, rather than age, is the most important demographic factor for predicting fatal wrecks. Poverty has an important impact on traffic fatalities because the poor drive older, less-safe vehicles on decrepit roads. Poor people are also in worse health and often have little access to medical care. In fact, fatal accidents in poor California counties exceed accidents in wealthy counties by 600 percent. The reason this produces a disproportionate number of fatal wrecks involving teens is that they are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as adults. "When teen and middle-aged poverty rates are equalized, teens are no more at risk on the highways than middle-agers," study author Mike Males said.

Apart from poverty, the risk posed by teens has been greatly overstated. Teen drivers are 40 percent likelier to be involved in fatal accidents than adults, but such accidents are still rare. If a teen and a middle-aged driver each drove from Boston to L.A. 5,000 times, the teen driver would cause only one more fatal crash. Furthermore, 40 percent may sound like a large difference, but drivers in Mississippi are 250 percent likelier to have such accidents than drivers in Connecticut. The reason? Once again, poverty is to blame, though County Line Road may also play a role.

Previous Comments

ID

65912

Comment

This is quite an enlightenment to me. As an old insurance employee, I hadn't heard anything even similat to this. I can see the financial reasons insurance companies would flee the truth. The poverty to accident information is really something to ponder.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2006-04-25T13:05:47-06:00