It should come as no surprise that teenagers don’t always make the best decisions. We, having survived our adolescence, can comfortably look back and laugh at how we managed to scrape by with (hopefully) no more than a few cuts and bruises, or perhaps a good story about a particularly interesting fracture. Unfortunately, this issue’s NHTSA report reminds us that living past childhood is not guaranteed. Young drivers–for the purposes of this article, those in the 15- to 20-year age group–are strongly overrepresented in national crash and fatality statistics. Despite being 9% of the US population and only 6% of licensed drivers, young drivers are implicated in 19% of 2007 US fatal crashes. Two thirds of the resultant fatalities are either the young drivers themselves or their passengers; in turn, two thirds of their passengers are also in the 15- to 20-year age group. Mortality data for 2006 indicate that motor vehicle crashes are by far the leading cause of death in this age group. Of persons aged 15 to 20 years, 17,744 died in 2006, with 6,072 of them dying as the result of a motor vehicle crash (more than twice as many as the next leading cause of death: homicide). Of those 6,072 victims, 4,877 were either young drivers or the passengers of young drivers. All told, 27.5% of all 15- to 20-year-olds who died in 2006 did so in a vehicle driven by someone their age. (Author/publisher)
Abstract