For a parent, teaching a teen to drive can be trying.
Start with normal strains a teen puts on parents, and add the prospect of a beginner behind the wheel. It’s a recipe for anxiety.
Both changes required either parents or guardians to spend extra time in the car as their children learned to drive.
But the tougher standards are working. The Division of Motor Vehicles reports that teen driving deaths dropped from 183 in 2010 to 114 in 2013, according to The Associated Press. And keep in mind that, by 2010, teen crashes, injuries and fatalities had already dropped considerably.
In 2012, the N.C. Child Fatality Task Force reported that after graduated licensing was initiated in 1997, crashes dropped by 38 percent for 16 year olds and by 20 percent for 17 year old. And since the task force began recommending changes to state driver-training procedures in 1991, the death rate for teen drivers had fallen by 50 percent.
Those statistics translate into thousands of teens who were not injured or killed, to millions of dollars in auto body work not required and untold hours of mourning avoided for families.
But so long as any improvements to state law can make teen driving, or for that matter all driving, safer, the work of the General Assembly is not done.
The DMV report found a development that contradicts the otherwise good news: Teens are getting cited for more moving and seat belt violations.
The DMV rightly wants changes to driver training programs to address those issues more emphatically.
Spending as much as 72 hours teaching a teen to drive, as the law requires, is a drain on parents, no doubt. But it is far better than getting that awful visit from a state trooper bearing bad news.
