Tiffany Thompson

Kirtus Thompson was 16 and only had his license since May when his Jeep’s steering wheel malfunctioned last Thursday. He tried to turn the wheel back but overcorrected.

Then the Jeep started to roll. Across the median. And roll. Into oncoming traffic. And roll.

Traveling northbound on U.S. 27, the Jeep rolled “at least 10 times,” and landed upside-down on the road’s southbound side, witnesses said. Thanks to a lack of heavy traffic at the time, and especially because he was wearing his seat belt, Kirtus suffered only minor injuries and left Erlanger hospital that night. He’s already back to work and driving, with four staples in his head and a bad scrape on his arm. No one else was hurt in the accident.

“I think God was looking out for me,” he said.

Stories like this are heard all the time — a teen that just got his driver’s license crashed his or her car. And sometimes the stories are worse than that. Last month in Ohio, 17-year-old Zachary Jordan lost his life in a crash mere hours after receiving his license, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.

Kirtus’s case was a lucky one. Although a litany of data, safety awareness groups and restrictive legislation are in place to help teens drive to work or school safely, the concern over young drivers is constant, especially when school’s out.

“The biggest problem — inexperience,” said Lt. Tim Griswold with the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s safety education division. “The younger the person, the more dangerous it is. They take more chances.”

The traffic report for Kirtus’s accident cited “operator inexperience” and “over correcting” as factors in the crash, but the report cleared the young man of blame, saying he was driving the speed limit and was sober.

But a lot of teens speed and they’re also more likely to pull out dangerously into oncoming traffic than adults, Lt. Griswold said.

And then there are cell phones.

“The biggest thing nowadays is the cell phones, texting and talking on the cell phones while they’re trying to drive,” Lt. Griswold said. Phone use at the wheel is illegal for anyone under 18, he noted.

SCARY NUMBERS

Although there is so much data on teen crash fatalities that it sometimes seems indecipherable, if not contradictory, generally the news isn’t good.

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teens in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The organization also found that inexperience and immaturity combine with speeding, driving under the influence, eschewing seat belts and distracted or drowsy driving to exacerbate the problem.

One commonly cited Safety Administration statistic reports that teenagers make up 7 percent of all licensed drivers, but they suffer 14 percent of crash fatalities and 20 percent of all accidents. Nearly 6,000 teens die in vehicle crashes every year, the Safety Administration reports.

The National Safety Council found that young drivers are involved in fatal traffic crashes at more than twice the rate as older drivers.

As government and nonprofit agencies seek solutions to the high accident rate, Tennessee’s three-stage graduated license program is one standard for limiting distractions and inexperience.

Begun in July 2001, the program limits driving privileges, gradually easing as the teen gets older. Seat belts are mandatory, driving between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. is restricted to special cases, and the program also limits the number of teen passengers allowed in the vehicle.

“One of the key things is having a graduated license law program in effect, where the student has to begin slowly, attain knowledge,” said John Baca, of Virtual Drive of America, an online driver education course that works with schools across the country. Tennessee’s Department of Motor Vehicles refers drivers to Virtual Drive of America.

GRADUATED LICENSES

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration officials say the graduated license program works, and they say every state should have it. They cite the statistic that 16-year-old drivers tend to be involved in crashes three times more often than 17-year-olds and five times more often than 18-year-olds.

Records show, though, that only seven states had more 16- to 20-year-old fatalities than Tennessee in 2006.

“With young drivers, it just seems like it gets worse every year,” Lt. Griswold said.

Tennessee’s graduated license program is “kind of lenient,” Mr. Baca said, also noting that driver education courses are not mandatory in the state.

Georgia made taking a driver education course mandatory in 2006, requiring 30 hours of driver’s education to receive a license at age 16. Chattanooga and Hamilton County school systems eliminated driver education programs in the mid-1990s, citing the high costs. Hamilton County Schools leaders estimated in March it would cost $1.2 million to start a systemwide driver’s education class, according to Chattanooga Times Free Press articles.

A sticking point in the graduated license program is that the state puts faith in the teen’s parents to certify that the driver has completed 50 hours of experience behind the wheel. With the inconveniences of busy schedules for parents and teens, the guardian could easily cut corners when pledging the teen’s driving experience, according to Lt. Griswold and Mr. Baca.

“They’re getting their license, but they might be fudging on actually making their kids spend 50 hours behind the wheel because of gas prices,” Lt. Griswold said. “With gas prices nowadays, 50 hours driving can run up a pretty big gas bill.”

HIGH GAS PRICES

Then again, gas prices could actually save teen lives. A new study says driving could decline with high gas prices, resulting in fewer deaths from accidents.

The study, by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Harvard Medical School, said they found that for every 10 percent increase in gas prices, there was a 6 percent decrease in vehicle fatalities for drivers age 15 to 17 — and that was during a period when gas cost only $2.50 a gallon.

Still, the Thompsons, along with safety experts, say parents can play the key role in deciding whether teens drive dangerously by promoting safety and by forcing them to practice.

“Everywhere we drove, he drove,” said Kirtus’s mother, Tiffany Thompson. “When kids have more experience driving with supervision, the tendency is they’re better drivers.”

“Your parents need to teach you,” Kirtus agreed.

According to the Click It or Ticket fact sheet, adults really are role models. Observational research showed that if a driver is wearing a seat belt, 86 percent of the time toddlers also will buckle up. If the driver is not wearing a seat belt, however, only 24 percent of the time will toddlers wear it.

Another study, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, found that when parents set limits on their teens’ driving, it reduces the likelihood of risky driving behavior.

SIMULATED CRASHES HIT HOME

One kind of program seems to be making an impact because it hits teens closest to home.

A coalition of county groups and the Tennessee Highway Patrol each offer separate simulated-crash programs, which bring kids face to face with mangled wrecks and the damage done to the occupants.

On Thursday, the local youth program Stop the Madness, working with the Advisory Council on Traffic Safety, Chattanooga-Hamilton Health Department, and area police departments, showed a video made by two Red Bank High School students. “A Day to Remember,” which won a Tennessee High School Press Association award in March, shows a fictional crash, emergency room operation, funeral home and court proceedings for a 16-year-old who drove drunk and caused another character to lose her life.

“I should be picking out a prom dress — anything but a casket,” the teen’s mother says.

Sixty or so kids from the Stop the Madness group watched the video at Taylor Funeral Home in East Chattanooga as part of a larger program on how teens suffer senseless deaths to violence and drunk driving. The atmosphere was morbid even before the program started, and some kids were already choking up.

“When you bury a child, you don’t just bury a child,” entire families and communities are affected, the Rev. Ternae Jordan, founder of Stop the Madness, told the group afterward.

Lt. Griswold said visiting schools and showing videos are helpful. So is introducing young drivers to a rollover simulator, a device that shows students a Nissan rigged to a truck and a machine that can roll the vehicle as if it were in a crash like Kirtus’s. By comparing the damage done to mannequins wearing a seat belt and what happens without one, the simulator shows teens why 80 percent of drivers ejected from their vehicle are killed.

“For the life of me, I can’t see why they wouldn’t wear their seat belt,” Lt. Griswold said.