by Michelle Coppedge

North Carolina's Graduated Driver's License is based on enlightened legislation and Carolina research. And it's keeping young drivers alive.

There are at least one hundred people walking around in our state alive today who wouldn't be without GDL," says Rob Foss.

That's his estimate of how many lives have been saved by graduated driver licensing (GDL). Since December 1997, new North Carolina drivers aged fifteen to eighteen have been subject to restrictions on unsupervised and nighttime driving — and more recently, on the number of passengers they may transport. GDL's benefits are measured in crashes avoided: According to recent figures, sixteen-year-old drivers crash 34 percent less often than they did before GDL, and seventeen-year-olds crash 21 percent less often. The North Carolina driving environment has transformed — a change that had a lot to do with Foss and Carolina's Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC).

During the first stages of GDL, young drivers may only drive with teenage passengers if a supervising driver is in the car. Photo by Jason Smith; click to enlarge.

The HSRC has recognized the wisdom of making teen drivers safer for over two decades, says Foss, senior research scientist at the HSRC. In the 1970s, Patricia Waller, then a researcher at the HSRC, led studies of North Carolina teen driver crashes. Her work led to a radical proposal — rearranging the system by which young drivers were licensed. Young, inexperienced drivers were highly overrepresented in North Carolina crashes. What they needed was more practice under safer conditions. Why not minimize their exposure to high-risk conditions, such as nighttime driving and multiple passengers, and extend the period in which they drove with a supervising driver? This longer practice period would produce more experienced teen drivers and, Waller believed, would drastically reduce the number of young drivers who crashed.

In response to the HSRC's initial studies, Foss says, "There was a dribble of attention. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommended that states do such a thing — and basically nobody really did." It wasn't until 1994 that the Administration rekindled interest in graduated driver licensing by making funding available to states to take another crack at the issue. And the HSRC, in cooperation with the Governor's Highway Safety Program, did just that.

Rob Foss on the streets made safer by graduated driver licensing. Photo by Steve Exum; click to enlarge.

Graduated driver licensing was Rob Foss's first project when he arrived at the HSRC ten years ago. He and other researchers studied teen crash rates, evaluated the results of restricted driving programs such as New Zealand's three-tiered licensing system, and conducted public forums and surveys of parents and teens. "We wanted to check out the feasibility of doing such a thing in the U.S. — were there any legal barriers to it, were there any structural barriers to it, were there any public opinion barriers to it," he says. "And what we found was no, no, no."

Following recommendations by Foss and other HSRC researchers, the bill enacting graduated driver licensing passed quickly in the 1997 North Carolina legislative session, making North Carolina the second state with a GDL system (Michigan, where Patricia Waller was by then working, was the first). North Carolina's GDL system requires young drivers to progress through three levels of licensure, with gradually decreasing restrictions on their nighttime and unsupervised driving. (See North Carolina's Graduated Driver's License Law, page 15.) Under GDL, the earliest possible age at which a teen can have a full license is sixteen and a half.

Legislators and parents were eager to see if GDL was working. Foss says he and other researchers were confident that it would have dramatic effects, but, because the program was so new, the numbers were slow in coming. "We had a two-and-a-half-year lag before there was anybody on the road who had gone through GDL and had had any chance of crashing," Foss says. In October 2001, Foss and colleagues published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association comparing crashes among sixteen-year-old drivers before and after GDL. Overall, crashes had decreased by 23 percent. GDL was working.

Research continued as more drivers who had been through GDL hit the streets. Foss and others felt that crashes among teen drivers could come down even more. By that time, many states had enacted GDL programs that included a passenger restriction in the second level of licensing. Statistics showed that the more young passengers a newly unsupervised teen driver had in the car, the more likely he or she was to crash. In the 2002 session of the North Carolina legislature, a bill adding a restriction of one young (under age twenty-one) passenger to the Level Two license "just sailed through," says Senator Austin Allran, who was chief sponsor of both the 1997 and 2002 bills.

Public perceptions of the driving environment had clearly changed in many ways in the preceding twenty years. For instance, in the 1970s, it was generally thought that driver education (with only six mandatory hours of driving practice) made safer drivers. "By the eighties, we knew it didn't," Foss says. He also recognizes the influence of a political climate of "family values" in getting GDL passed, the role of the media in bringing young driver safety to public consciousness in the 1990s, the success of the New Zealand GDL program, and improvements in computer technology that made clear presentations of study results and statistics possible. In addition, the use of research data to guide policy decisions is much more common now than twenty years ago, Foss says.

The North Carolina legislature passed GDL in large part because of the work of Foss and others at the HSRC. "We relied on their statistics," Senator Allran says. "They're not legislators and they're not lobbyists, but they compile statistics we can't get on our own, answer lots of questions, and give credibility to the argument." Foss worked closely with Allran and others to help ensure that the GDL legislation was drafted effectively.

How do teens feel about the new rules that go along with GDL? "I like the system because it helps you to gradually become comfortable with driving by yourself," says Catherine Amos, a seventeen-year-old from Charlotte. Foss agrees. "Teens, frankly, think it's not such a bad idea," he says. "They don't like certain parts of it all that much, but they see the wisdom of it."

"To the beginning driver it seems as though it takes a long time to finally get your full license," says Samantha Fay, eighteen, of Charlotte. "But I think that graduated licensing is needed to ensure not only the safety of that driver, but other drivers on the road." Which is precisely what GDL is about, Foss says. "We're not talking about driver's licenses — we're talking about the lives of kids. And oh, by the way, when a teenager has a crash, they often hit somebody else. About a third of the people killed in sixteen-, seventeen-year-old driver crashes are in other cars."

With the new passenger restriction in place, has North Carolina enacted the ideal system of graduated driver licensing? Yes, Foss says, in terms of restrictions and legislation. But there is still fine-tuning to be done. Researchers are currently studying the effects of the passenger restriction, as well as other things more difficult to measure. As Samantha Fay points out, "There is no guarantee that the parent or parents will practice with their child, which is very necessary in the early stages of driving." Also, she asks, "How will they enforce graduated licensing? Unless it shows value, and kids believe it is enforced, it won't help." Current GDL research at the HSRC is exploring the perceived roles of parents, as well as law enforcement, in making graduated driver licensing as effective as it can be.

Before all the data are in, though, Foss knows that many parents are spending time with their children behind the wheel — and that the effects of GDL transcend even a reduction in crash statistics. First anecdotally, and then systematically through surveys, parents have told Foss and his colleagues something unexpected. "We heard any number of spontaneous comments from parents to the effect that, 'I thought this was going to be such a pain — and now I am so glad, because it was a wonderful time. You know, we actually got to spend time with one another again, in ways that we hadn't since she was young.'"

Graduated driver licensing is a rare synergism, Foss says, between "pointy-headed researcher types," legislators, and parents — an instance of research directly affecting legislation, which, in turn, has a direct application to the lives of North Carolinians. "This is a partnership between the state and parents to try to protect teens," Foss says. "As adults, that's our job, and it doesn't stop when they're twelve — and it surely shouldn't stop when they go into the most dangerous time of their lives."

Patricia Waller passed away in August 2003 in Chapel Hill. The Highway Safety Research Center's current research on graduated driver licensing issues is funded by the North Carolina Governor's Highway Safety Program and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Michelle Coppedge is editorial assistant for Endeavors magazine.