The change in the law should have required a longer period of time before teens were permitted to take the road test for their license, instead of making the rules stricter after they obtained a license.

As of January 2006, teenagers with provisional licenses--those between the ages of 16 to 18--have to wait one year before a friend under the age of 20 can ride in their car. These teen drivers also have to be home by 11 p.m. Prior to January, teens had to wait only six months before they could drive their friends under 20 around, and they had to be home by midnight during the first year. There are still a few exceptions, such as driving a sibling or if a teen has a job past midnight. But I contend that the real problem is in the foundation of the law.

Last March I wrote about the experiences my daughter and I shared while she was learning to drive. In that column I said six months of driving was an insufficient amount of time for any teen to learn the non-mechanical rules of the road and qualify for a driver's license. Those who did pass after only six months were inexperienced and definitely ill-equipped to take the wheel solo. I believed the law should require a teen to have a year of driving experience before taking the road test. Then the six-month friends rule would mean they'd have 1 ¹/2 years of driving under their belt. And that first year would have been with an adult.

The way it is now, the law requires an adult to guide a teen only through the first six months of driving, then that teen can get a license and drive by themselves for a year. But during the next 12 months, there probably will be no one in the car over the age of 21 to tell them what to watch out for, how to anticipate driver behavior, or how to look toward the horizon for potential changes in road conditions. These teenagers have to figure it out by themselves because they definitely won't want Mom or Dad in the car once they are legal. This is why I think the law is backward.

And I guarantee you that they will take there friends for a ride before the 12-month probation period expires. And they will come home after 11 p.m. Twelve months is a very long time, and 11 p.m. is early on special occasions.

The other sticky aspect of the law pertains to the teens who were already past the six-month probationary period in 2005 and were driving their friends around. Suddenly these teens find themselves violating the law. The same problem pertains to the hours, pushing the curfew back by an hour. There was no grandfather provision in the law.

I think this is unfair, especially to teenagers who have been driving longer than six months but fall short of the one-year rule. The problem here is that most of those teenagers, whether their parents know it or not, are going to scoff at the change and keep doing what they anxiously waited to do when it was legal--drive their friends around. And it's hard enough getting a teen home on time, let alone telling them they have to advance their curfew an hour.

If we switched to tougher restrictions in the pre-license stage, then the post-license stage the situation would be controllable. At the same time all these teenagers would be gaining valuable road hours behind the wheel and an adult would be present.

I have no quarrel with the efforts to save lives and reduce the number of accidents among teen drivers. But remember, many of those accidents happen to seniors in high school who are well past the one-year requirement. Next time we change the rules, let's look at the problems preemptively instead of after the fact.

--Editor's note

Moryt Milo is the editor of The Willow Glen Resident. She can be contacted at 400.200.1051 or mmilo@community-newspapers.com.