by Kevin A. Wilson

The good news touted frequently: Driving in America today is safer than a generation ago. Pick your favorite explanation(s). Safer vehicles, safer roads, seatbelt laws, crackdowns on drunk driving, graduated licensing for new teenage drivers and other factors all contribute. The result: In 1979 (during the era of the 55-mph speed limit, mind you), the highway death toll in the United States was 51,093, or 20.8 per billion vehicle-kilometers of travel. By 2006, the total was 42,692, or roughly 9.4 per billion vehicle-kilometers. That the total number of deaths on our highways is down only a little more than 16 percent and hovers above 40,000 deaths a year is largely a result of an increasing number of vehicles driven greater distances. But the rate has declined to about half of what it was a quarter-century ago.

Great news, right? Kudos are due to the traffic safety community—legislators, consumer advocates, regulators and insurers, mostly—members of which regularly proclaim this to be one of the great public health success stories of the era, if they do say so themselves.

Or maybe not. Until the late 1970s, America had the safest roads in the world by every measure. We don't anymore.

Depending on how you tally the rate—experts routinely argue over whether to measure against distance traveled, the number of vehicles, the number of drivers or per capita total population (each method lends its own insights)—we rank as high as fifth or as low as 46th in the world.

Who's doing better, and what might we learn from their superior gains? Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland all went from trailing the United States to leading it, according to Leonard Evans in his authoritative book Traffic Safety, in a chapter entitled, "The Dramatic Failure of U.S. Safety Policy." (The entire text is available at www.scienceservingsociety.com, though mostly stripped of the supporting statistics, charts and tables.)

Had our road safety improved at the same rate as Great Britain's, for instance, we'd have had roughly 27,000 deaths instead of 42,000-plus last year; had we kept pace with Canada or Australia, the toll would be lower still. Add Japan, Germany and France to the list of countries where improvements outstrip our own.

Evans says that when he cites this difference in performance, he's often asked what the other countries are doing that's "abnormal" compared with America. But, he explains, America isn't the norm; it's our behavior that's atypical among developed nations.

While our safety agencies have focused on vehicles, technology and litigation, other countries have zeroed in on the cause of most crashes: drivers. Through education and rigorous law enforcement, they've improved driver behavior and driver performance, yielding far greater gains in traffic safety than we've attained in the same time period. We've made some improvements with proliferating airbags, rigorous crash testing and, soon, mandatory stability control systems, but we haven't addressed the driver in the same comprehensive fashion.

Here's one small example: tire inflation. In other countries where the state mandates a curriculum, drivers are trained to check inflation and come to understand why it's important. Here, we mandate onboard technology to tell the driver when a tire is underinflated.

WHEN YOU DELVE INTO THE IMPROVEMENT overseas, though, you find it comes at som costs that Americans may not be eager to swallow. Enforcement measures alone in these countries tend to exceed the limits of what we revere as civil liberties. Much more than in the States, cameras are used to ticket drivers for speed and red-light violations, police conduct random breathalyzer tests (in any given year, one in three Australian drivers will be stopped at random and asked to prove sobriety), and violations of traffic laws carry fines many of us would find grossly out of line with the infraction.

On the education front, generalizations beyond "It's harder to get a license overseas" are tough to make, because, though European countries are working toward and EU standard, licensing laws vary from country to country even more widely than they do among U.S. states.

In Denmark, a new driver—who can't get a learner's permit until age 18—can expect to invest at least two years and more than $4,000 in progressing to a full license, according to Bo Christian Koch, editor in chief of Motor magazine (a publication of FDM, Denmark's national auto club). Time and cost are typical for those countries lowest in road fatalities and include not only the cost of attending a driver's school and the steep testing and licensing fees but also, frequently, the cost of mandatory training in advanced first aid and emergency response. Total highway fatalities have dropped in Denmark by about a third in just the past decade.

In Germany, only a state-certified driving school can grant an applicant admission to take the final driver's-license tests. There are restrictions on the minimum age to start learning (18), but there is no age at which a new driver is exempt from the education requirement in many EU countries. Road tests are typically 45 minutes to an hour long.

Most European countries mandate a national curriculum that includes emergency braking and low-friction handling (Sweden is notable for demanding rigorous skid-control training), and some—Germany again being more stringent than most—also professionalize the education process by licensing instructors. Becoming a licensed driver educator in Germany can take thousands of dollars and years of study. It's a far cry from the high school shop teacher or librarian who earns a few extra bucks teaching driver's ed on the side in American public schools—many of these are sincere and dedicated to their role, but the official demands on them aren't nearly as great as they are for the full-time professionals teaching in other countries.

Even Canadian provinces, where practice resembles that in the United States in general terms, usually have stiffer regulations under their graduated driver-licensing plans for new drivers. In Ontario, for instance, a new driver must undergo not one but two road tests before reaching full licensure. It can take up to five years to complete the process, though most finish in two or three. The probationary period can be shortened by taking classes approved by the Ministry of Transport. Fees borne by the applicant for testing and each stage of licensing tend to be more expensive than those in most U.S. states.

A prominent exception to the governmental educational focus in Europe is the United Kingdom, where the government-administered driver's license test is the standard measure of competence—no classes are required. But the exams, both written and on-the-road, are so rigorous that a new driver's chances of passing without having enrolled in a professional school are low so more than 80 percent of new drivers, regardless of age, enroll. One unforeseen consequence: an underground economy of people who will fraudulently take the tests in someone else's name.

Also in Britain, after licensing and some experience, a supplementary course ("Pass Plus") makes the driver eligible for a big (up to 30 percent) insurance discount.

By contrast, almost all U.S. states permit an applicant older than 18 to get a license without attending any driver education program at all (exceptions are Virginia and Washington, D.C., where the ages are 19 and 21, respectively), and then both written and road tests tend to be cursory by world standards. As for insurance discounts for advanced education, practices vary widely by company and state, but such discounts are few and far between and rarely moentarily significant.

Many European nations still allow Mom and Dad or some other responsible lay instructor to teach an individual to drive, but the investment in professional training is viewed as worthwhile because those who take the pro classes pass the tests in greater numbers than those who take the amateur route.

America isn't Europe, of course. "There are other motivations in these countries, I'd say; than just teaching people how to drive. In most of these countries where you hear that licensing take two or three years and $4,000 to $6,000, they're actively trying to discourage people from driving," asserts Jim Baxter, president of the National Motorists Association. The NMA is a driver's rights organization with a libertarian bent, famed for leading the push to abolish America's old 55-mph national speed limit.

"You're talking about countries with public mass-transit systems and national policies aimed at reducing the number of private vehicles in use and at boosting transit ridership." America, he points out, is a largely car-dependent nation with an entirely different sort of geography, infrastructure and social fabric.

"There's a strong undertone (in Europe) to discourage or economically prohibit people from driving—presumably the less capable—and steer them toward using transit systems," Baxter says. Sometimes this is more than an "undertone" but explicit. Denmark, for one, mandates a curricular component that teaches "when not to use the car," telling the new driver that mass transit is better for certain trips. Instructors are also required to teach means of maximizing fuel efficiency and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

"These are places where gasoline is taxed at $5 a gallon or more, parking is taxed to discourage people from driving into cities, and the social norm is less diverse than in America. A country like Sweden or Switzerland is essentially a monoculture, while we have a different situation—we have social diversity, geographic diversity, and our country is organized around private transportation.

"If you reduce the exposure (to driving), if you don't let people drive, of course the fatality rate goes down. I don't think that's right for us."

This is one reason there is debate about the means by which traffic safety is measured. America's performance looks best when measured against distanced traveled (it ranks fifth-safest among nine countries reporting reliable statistics) and worst when tabulated as fatalities per 100,000 population (by which measure the United States ranks 26th in a report cited by Evans and 46th among 48 countries in a more recent United Nations survey). But this is a big country with long driving distances and people who drive a lot. We have the most licensed drivers per 100,000 population, too, so we're exposed to highway dangers more than those in the "safer" countries.

Can it be that our higher fatality rate can be written off as just another price of freedom? Are 42,000 deaths a year just the cost we pay for freedom of mobility, freedom from government intrusion? Consider the freedom we surrender every time we boaard an aircraft, for instance. We do this in the intersts of combating terrorism. Yet we kill a lot more Americans on our highways in any given year than terrorists have managed to kill in decades. Is there a way to preserve liberties and yat reduce the cost in lives, injuries and dollars?

Driving may be a necessity for most Americans, but the license to do so is not a logal right; it's an earned privilege, one you can lose for repeated violations of the terms of the social contract. Demanding a higher standard of qualification before issuing a licnese to an individual can be regarded as less an intrusion on rights than due protection of the public welfare.

Canada and Australia, which most resemble America geographically and socially, have made greater strides in highway safety. They both do better on a distance-traveled measure, but, as noted earlier, they've yielded some civil liberties in the process. Other nations geographically similar in terms of size and diverse terrain—such as Russia and China—have worse traffic records than the United States on a per-mile basis yet fare better on per-capita rankings, because only a small portion of the populace owns and drives cars. Until the recent economic boom, hardly any Chinese people owned cars, and the road network, though rapidly improving, remains rudimentary by global standards.

Can America train drivers to perform better without giving up either mobility or rights?

"I'd be opposed to any licensing system that would have the effect of excluding the economically disadvantaged from using private transportation," Baxter says. "Of course, there can be costs, but they shouldn't be so high as to exclude people or prevent us, as a society, from helping people to afford it. Teaching people to drive should be about teaching them how to handle a car and do so safely—it shouldn't be subject to these other social engineering agendas."

We've already given up some level of freedom in exchange for safety—freedom of those too young to vote, that is. One of the great advances, statistically speaking, in American traffic safety over the past decade has been the spread of graduated driver licensing (GDL) among the states. This alone has reduced fatalities among 15- to 17-year-olds dramatically, but mostly by denying them full license privileges until they're 18.

David Thompson, who runs his Car Control Clinic courses in 10 U.S. cities, says such measures may save lives but do nothing to train safe drivers for life. Excluding any class of drivers will reduce fatalities once. Improved training should yield lasting benefits that extend into the future.

"If you say fatalities among 16-year-olds are down 25 percent, what have you done? You're just postponing the day they hit the road without the right experience and training," Thompson says. "People talk about these expensive programs that take special equipment of incredible amounts of time, and they don't want to recognize that you can do it at fairly low cost using the students' own cars and a parking lot. If we wanted to do it, as a society, for every new driver, that adds up to money, but parents who are interested enough can do it for their kids today without spending a fortune or getting on a plane to go six states away."

Thompson's program and several similar ones across the country include a lot more dynamic training than is strictly required in most states in which the schools operate, and yet the fee is typically less than a tenth of what Europeans must pay in their private schools. Colorado seems to be one welcoming environment for programs that not only meet the state's minimum standards but go beyond. The teen-driving programs at both Ronn Langford's Master Drive and Mike Pettiford's Go4It Racing School are certified for state licensing purposes. Some other states, however, exclude schools that add emergency-maneuvering exercises to the mandated curriculum under their GDL laws.

It's not that GDL in itself is worthless, it's a key component of the systems in Australia and Canada, both of which have better records than the United States.

The value, Baxter says, is found in gradually exposing new drivers to more challenging tasks and keeping them in safer circumstances while they accumulate experience. Indeed, even as Europe has reduced its fatality rates, it still sees the highest risk among newly licensed, younger drivers (18 to 24 years old is the usual measure there). Generally, the accident rates for all drivers have come down at the same rate, so the relative position of young drivers to experienced ones remains roughly the same. The move to GDL in America has seen the gap shrink: The toll among teens is down more than it is for the population at large.

"But I think we may be missing out on something by delaying the start of driving," NMA's Baxter adds. "Kids 14 or 15 years old are motivated to learn. They can be taught, even if we're not going to let them drive without restrictions. But GDL programs are pushing the age up. That reduces exposure, but it misses the chance to use that enthusiasm and interest young people have to master new skills."

Although most European countries have restricted licensing to age 17 or 18, the EU has backed a few test programs to evaluate lowering the age for a learner's permit—necessary for enrollment in schools—to 16, so that more drivers may be fully licensed at 18.

Baxter suggests that one way to minimize risk to teens and other road users while also beginning instruction early is to expand the use of advanced simulators. "Simulaters used to be a joke, but electronic technology has come so far that you can give kids a lot of basic knowledge before they get on the road."

Thompson sees the potential but says there's no substitute for experience behind the wheel of a car.

Baxter and the NMA do like to hold up one European experience as an ideal America might copy: the German autobahn, where travel speeds are much higher (often unlimited) than on U.S. interstates and yet the fatality rate is now about 30 percent lower than on our federal highways (3.5 fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers on the 'bahn versus 5.2 on the interstate). As recently as 20 years ago, the interstates were a lot safer than the autobahns, but not anymore.

"They teach and enforce real lane discipline and high-speed driving techniques. There are more speed limits there than there used to be, but enforcement isn't only about speed," Baxter notes. "We're certainly advocates of that sort of training and enforcement. But at the same time, you should notice that the other roads in Germany have a higher fatality rate than our non-interstates (12.4 versus 10.7). You're never really comparing apples to apples."

That Ontario, Canada, keeps new drivers off the high-speed roads is one example of gradually introducing teens to more challenging driving tasks. Some countries require that cars driven by new drivers carry identifying badges or license plates (a 17-year-old with a learner's permit in Britain, for instance, has a badge on the back of the car that says "L17"). A young driver progresses through three such plates in New South Wales, Australia, where the graduated licensing system moves from a learner's permit at age 16 in stages that take four years to complete. The first state demands 120 hours of accompanied driving—most U.S. states require 50 hours, the minimum recommended by AAA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Clearly, there is room for stiffer requirements and testing without significantly higher costs or excluding and group.

Already, there are Americans committed to the hard work of improving driver education far beyond today's norms in the pursuit of highway safety. The United States was once the safest place in the world to drive. We can reclaim that position—if we only decide to do so.

Reprinted from AutoWeek, August 27, 2007

Printed here for review purposes only. All Copyrights honored and attributed to producers. If there is a problem with the use of any material, please let us know.