Two weeks ago, at 1:00 a.m. on a Thursday, two Massachusetts
teenage girls died when their SUV rammed a utility pole. The Jaws
of Life had to be employed to remove the bodies of Shauna Murphy,
17, and her sister Meghan, 15, and the still-living Melissa Smith,
15. So smashed was the upside-down car, firemen said, you couldn’t
tell who was driving.
Police have still not been able to identify the driver, though
the Boston Globe’s follow-up story notes that only Shauna
Murphy was legally old enough to drive. Shauna Smith is too
seriously injured to talk. Police say the girls had not been
drinking.
I might not have paid much attention to this story, except that
it hit close to home. One of our regular babysitters came to work
for us when she was 19, just out of high school. Twice in the next
year, Ashley called me, unable to come to work. She had to rally to
the side of some friend involved in a fatal car crash. Ashley had a
lot of friends through her former high school sorority. “It feels
like I’m going to a funeral once a month,” she told me, so often
were sorority sisters killed on the highway.
In the most highly publicized of the two accidents for which
Ashley missed work, a friend ran a car off a notoriously dangerous
twisty road near Gloucester in the middle of the night and smashed
into a tree. The passenger, thrown from the vehicle, died. Ashley’s
friend, badly injured, was eventually charged with vehicular
manslaughter.
“Oh, no, she won’t go to jail,” Ashley kept saying as she gave
me updates on the case in the weeks following. She was quite
sure.
She was right. The judge reduced the charges, convicted, and
sentenced the young driver to probation.
I presume she also lost her driver’s license, which strikes me
as almost irrelevant by case’s end.
INSURANCE INDUSTRY STATS TELL US that a wildly disproportionate
percentage of automobile accidents involve young or new drivers.
(The two are usually the same.) As I continued to notice
headline-making fatal crashes in Massachusetts, I observed some
additional elements: 1) late hours; 2) high speed; 3) no seat
belts; and 4) girls. The ill-fated youths had usually not been
drinking. But girls sure seemed to get into lots of wrecks.
At my own instigation, and with (probably) no result, I talked
with Ashley about driving. I told her how highly skewed were the
accident stats toward youth. I told the story of my old motorcycle
crash, when I was still young and in my first year on the bike. I
cautioned her that she did not really know yet how a car behaved in
different conditions or how she herself would react under
stress.
In one ear, as I say. She did not like these discussions much,
so I didn’t pursue them. Ashley always displayed total
responsibility with us. On her own for the first time, Ashley did
what all girls her age probably do. She would think nothing of
taking an impulse trip, over a day and a half, to Montreal and
back, a 500-mile drive, four girls packed into an old and not very
well maintained community college student’s economy sedan. She
stayed up late; I learned never to phone Ashley before 9 a.m. She
did not always think ahead very well. I once got a despairing call
from her, saying she was stuck in Boston. She had gone to the
Patriots’ victory party at noon on City Hall Plaza. So had a
million other people. She tended to go along with what friends
wanted. Once, one asked her to accompany her to a tattoo parlor;
she was scared. Ashley went and got a tattoo, too (her second), to
make her friend feel better.
BOYS BEHAVE THE SAME way. So why do so many more accident reports
seem to include all-girl-occupied cars? I can speculate. Boys’
probably wider athletic experience may give them an edge in
handling cars that veer out of control. Boys may well have taken an
interest in auto racing and handling, may even have done some
controlled skid experiments in Dad’s car. Or the police may
scrutinize boys more closely and stop them more often.
All such accidents make fodder for the pols. Massachusetts being
no exception, local Republican Rep. Bradford Hill has introduced a
bill that increases the number of hours parents must supervise
their teen’s driving before age 16, under the “learner’s permit”
stage. The law currently requires 12 hours; the bill increases that
to 30.
That strikes me as scarcely effectual. Back when I was a
liberal, gung-ho for mass transit and opposed to urban sprawl, I
advocated raising the driving age to 21. Outraged parents, I
reasoned, would be so frustrated at having to drive their teens
everywhere that they would form a powerful lobby for more trains
and buses. Yeah, right. In Denver, Salt Lake, Houston, outraged
parents and teens would have hung a legislator who proposed such a
thing. We can’t rebuild our entire society to save a few teen
lives. The transportation wars were over 50 years ago. The car
won.
AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING CAN be carried only so far. But perhaps we
could extend an existing law enforcement habit and make it
effective against the teen fatality trends. Police, as I have
noted, tend to stop teenage boys in cars. It’s profiling, of
course, but entirely understandable, and it’s been going on for
decades. Why not give cops a reason for stopping under-21s of both
sexes? Our state’s insurance lobbyists have been pushing for a
so-called “primary seat belt law.” Such would make the failure to
wear a seatbelt a traffic violation. The legislators, driven by the
people’s loathing for giving the police any additional reason to
stop them, have opposed the measure every time it’s come up.
I think this limited measure could pass, however. Critics would
complain that the insurance industry, having once gotten its nose
inside the tent, will continue to push the law’s extension to all
drivers. Very possibly. But the under-21 law could also serve as a
test. Leave it for a year, while police scrutinize drivers and cars
owned by the under-21 set. There should be a statistical drop in
youthful traffic deaths.
We might also consider a driving curfew for under-21s.
These two measures being darned near unthinkable, however, I
propose an expensive alternative: High-speed hazard driving courses
for all drive-training students.
