ACEP: Emergency Physicians Offer Advice on Decreasing Teen Motor Vehicle Fatalities

Excerpted from the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP)

"Crashes Among Teen Drivers Peak in Summer Months"

Teen drivers average 44 percent more hours behind the wheel each week during the summer. Of the 6,434 youth (ages 15 to 20) motor vehicle fatalities in 2000, July saw more deaths (644) than any other month, followed by June (600), September (590) and August (587), according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Based on the latest injury prevention research, emergency physicians offer the following advice to parents on how to decrease their teen's risk of a fatal crash.

Limit Passengers
Teenage passengers significantly increase the risk of a fatal crash for 16- and 17-year-old drivers and the risk increases with the number of passengers. In fact, the majority of deaths that occur in crashes involving young drivers are to other people, particularly their own passengers. Parents of teenagers may want to limit their child's exposure to teenage drivers, even if it means driving their child themselves.

Limit Night-time Driving
Setting a 9 p.m. driving restriction for novice drivers could save their lives. In 2003, 32-percent of the crashes that killed 16- and 17-year-old drivers occurred between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Choose a Safe Vehicle
Traffic safety experts believe that some vehicles are riskier for teen drivers. Sports cars can incite novice drivers to dangerous behavior, placing them and their passengers in jeopardy. Older vehicles may lack safety features of newer models, increasing occupants' risk of serious injury in a crash. The higher center of gravity in light trucks, including pickups and Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) may combine with novice mistakes and lead to an increased risk of rolling over.

Buckle Up
Parents and peers of teen drivers can have a major influence over safety belt use. This is important because of the teens killed as occupants in motor vehicles in 2003, only 33 percent (37 percent of drivers and 25 percent of passengers) were wearing safety belts at the time of the crash. One of the biggest factors affecting whether teenage drivers and passengers involved in fatal crashes were wearing a safety belt was whether or not the state where they were driving had a primary safety belt law - one that allows a police officer to pull the vehicle over simply for having occupants who are unbelted.

Zero Tolerance for Alcohol Use
Alcohol use increases the crash risk for all drivers. However, alcohol's contribution to heightened crash risk for drivers under 21 is markedly greater at lower blood alcohol concentrations, and increases more sharply at all levels of alcohol use.

For this reason, all states and territories in the U.S. have zero tolerance legislation, which means the legal limit of alcohol in a driver under 21 is zero (or 0.02, the limit of the test). However, relatively few teens know this (ranging from 32 percent to 71 percent).