It’s the Law: What I want for Christmas

When I was growing up in Silicon Valley, the favorite place to go was Santa Cruz. And, then as now, we teenagers preferred to travel in packs. So we’d stuff as many of us as possible into a car and head over the hill.
Back in the caveman days, Highway 17 had no divider. Combining a herd of laughing teenagers, an inexperienced driver and an extremely dangerous road can make for a volatile brew. The papers reported horrific head-on crashes on a regular basis.
At the time, I was looking for my first car. I coveted the now-legendary 1969 Boss 302 Mustang 2+2. That thing generated so many g’s, your ear wax would pop out. The problem, though, was that the Boss cost $3,000. Meanwhile, a perfectly serviceable 1968 Mustang coupe, with a six cylinder engine, was only $1,000. No amount of shameless pandering to the parents supplemented my meager resources. It was still a ’Stang, but 1968 was also the year California elected to hang every smog device known to man on the engine. It robbed that vehicle of every ounce of macho horsepower I salivated for.
In hindsight, I know I was lucky to not have the bucks to buy the Boss. I’d surely have killed myself, and it is a virtual certainty the ink on the license wouldn’t have dried before it was revoked. Still, if you asked me or my friends whether we were good drivers, the answer was, “Way better than my old fogey parents!”
Not the Legislature, not the Centers for Disease Control and certainly not the insurance companies were fooled by my hubris. The CDC reports that motor vehicle accidents remain the No. 1 cause of death among teenagers by a wide margin.
Some years ago, it was discovered that having more than one teenager in a car dramatically increased the risk of accidents. I can personally attest that having my buddies in the car put our collective IQ hovering in the single digits.
Armed with this knowledge, many states introduced graduated driver’s licensing laws.
Anyone who has a teenager is at least mildly aware of these laws. Essentially, they aim to give the young driver the chance to gain experience driving with as few distractions as possible. Studies have shown that well-designed graduated licensing laws reduce accidents by about 30 percent among young drivers.
Although not a complete rendition, what follows is the gist.
Most are aware of the permit phase that lasts at least 6 months, requires one of several forms of driver’s education and at least 50 hours of supervised driving, with at least 10 of those hours at night.
Then comes the meat of the law, with the two restrictions feared and hated by all teenagers. For one year, a provisionally licensed driver cannot drive between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. or drive with anyone under the age of 20, unless there is also a licensed parent or driver 25 or older in the car.
As with many laws, there are exceptions, but they are more restrictive than most people realize.
In the community, I hear people say it is always OK for a provisionally licensed minor to drive a family member. That isn’t quite true. A minor with a provisional license can drive an immediate family member, regardless of age and regardless of the time of day, only if the following also applies: It is for school, medical, employment or family necessity and, first, other reasonable transportation is not available; second, it is “necessary” that the minor do the driving (i.e., another driver is not available, such as the parent); and, third, there is a note signed by a doctor, employer, school official or parent, as the case may be, explaining the need and the date when the need will likely end.
The penalties for violation are too lengthy to cover in this column, but it is notable that a police officer may not stop a vehicle solely to check if there is a violation of this law. I suspect that every teenager alive intuitively knows this, because, knowing many of the teenagers in our valleys, I’m aware of how often they utterly ignore the proscription of driving their friends.
How does this past weekend’s Christmas holiday dovetail with this law? I stand at the threshold of a new era. Within a few days of Christmas, my children are of the age to begin driving. I shudder. For my children, what appeared under the tree paled in comparison with the looming permit. And what do I want for Christmas now that my children’s IQs so drastically exceed my own?
Gary Redenbacher of Scotts Valley is an attorney in private practice. Email him at ga**@re*********.com.