How Carolina developed the ‘gold standard’ in licensing young drivers

If you or your child first started driving in North Carolina — or most any other state, for that matter — within the past 25 years, chances are you’re familiar with graduated driver licensing. In short, graduated licensing is just that, a graduated phasing in of full driving privileges.

What you may not know is that the graduated licensing system came out of Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center following years of research to develop a science-based approach to reducing injuries and deaths that result from young driver crashes.

Graduated driver licensing became North Carolina law in 1997. The system was so successful, 47 other states adopted their own graduated licensing method.

Oct. 16-22 marks National Teen Driver Safety Week, the ideal time to recognize the Carolina team’s accomplishments a quarter century ago and the impact they have had since in North Carolina and many other states.

“By making teen drivers safer, we’ve made every single person using the road safer,” said Robert Foss, director emeritus of the Center for the Study of Young Drivers, part of the Highway Safety Research Center.

Driving in NC before GDL

When Foss came to Carolina in 1993, his first project was working with his research team on the feasibility of a new approach to licensing.

The idea of a graduated licensing system had been around for decades and was fully developed in the early 1970s by Patricia Waller, Foss’ predecessor and founding director of Carolina’s Injury Prevention Research Center. At the time, the new system was not embraced by the legislature and did not move forward.

Prior to the current system, Foss said someone could obtain a license by passing a driver’s education class, taking a written test about rules, passing an eye exam and taking a “really simple” road test to show “you kind of knew what you were doing.”

As the state saw a high rate of young driver crashes, researchers noticed a primary reason that couldn’t be mastered on a written test or a one-and-done road test: inexperience making in-the-moment decisions when factors change every day.

“The high crash rate among teenagers was not a matter of misbehavior. It was simply that novice drivers don’t know what they’re doing yet,” said Foss. “They’re complete amateurs at this complex behavior, so they make a lot of mistakes.”

Instead of clumping all teens together, Foss and his colleagues started looking at data for 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds, separately. Trends showed 16-year-olds were twice as likely to crash compared to 17-year-olds, and the crash rates decreased as drivers got older.

“This was not because teenagers change that fast. It’s because every 16-year-old was quite inexperienced, whereas most 17-year-olds had 12-24 months of driving experience,” said Foss.

Foss said it was this revelation that allowed the HSRC to “write the story of why GDL was needed.”

Carolina’s role

Specialists at the HSRC launched an educational campaign to explain to legislators and other officials the key principle of graduated licensing — that people learn to do complex tasks “by doing.”

Foss said using an analogy of a sport with continuous action, like basketball, allowed people to understand “you really need a lot of practice to become competent.” Just being able to dribble, pass or shoot doesn’t make someone a basketball player, much like how just knowing how to steer or stop a car doesn’t make someone a great driver overall.

“The important issue in avoiding crashing is being able to do all these basic things in the midst of a constantly changing environment,” Foss said. “The roadway system is always changing. Other drivers and what they’re doing around you are always changing.”

In the 1990s, Foss and other HSRC specialists spoke to North Carolina’s Child Fatality Task Force, which included policymakers and experts in child health. The task force then recommended graduated licensing to the legislature during the 1995 session. It was met with some skepticism, but the argument for graduated licensing was continued by advocates and media whenever a serious teen driver crash occurred.

In 1997, Foss said graduated licensing “roared through the legislature as the single-most popular piece of legislation during that session,” with 75% of the senate signed on to co-sponsor the bill.

How graduated licensing works

To begin the first stage, new drivers must be 15 and complete an approved driver education course. During the 12-month stage, drivers must be supervised by a parent or guardian while driving and complete the last six months without traffic violations.

The second stage consists of the young driver having a limited provisional license and being allowed to operate the vehicle unsupervised between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. with no more than one passenger under 21 years old, unless passengers are part of the same household.

At level three, the driver has a full provisional license, with no limits on passengers or night driving. 

Becoming the ‘gold standard’ 

Foss said it took four years before HSRC could make a full assessment, but data clearly showed 16-year-old driver crashes and fatalities plummeted once the graduated licensing system was in place.

After graduated licensing was enacted, HSRC data showed 16-year-old driver crashes in North Carolina declined by 38%, with fatal and serious injury crashes declining by 46%.

Foss said that in the years following implementation graduated licensing’s cohesive plan, data-driven approach and efficacy showcased the “gold standard” in licensing young drivers across North Carolina and “energized” 47 other states to install their own comprehensive GDL systems.

Foss said his team’s research brought him a deep sense of accomplishment.

“The fulfillment that an emergency room physician gets for saving a life … I had a bit of that in a different way,” Foss said. “I don’t know who didn’t get killed because of what we did, but I know there are a lot of them out there. There are thousands of people walking around today — in North Carolina alone — who would not have been had this not been done.”