How Can We Keep Young Drivers — and Others — Safe

Every year, thousands of young lives are lost on U.S. roads. For Kerri McGowan Lowrey, JD, MPH, that’s not just a statistic. It’s also a public health crisis that calls for data-driven solutions. 

As deputy director of the Network for Public Health Law’s Eastern Region office at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Lowrey partnered with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to examine how driver licensing laws impact teen safety. Her team applied a method known as legal epidemiology — quantifying laws so researchers can evaluate their real-world effects on health and safety. 

“This was an opportunity for us to get involved in a topic area that we found very compelling,” she said, adding that it also was an opportunity to apply legal epidemiology and explore law as both a remedy for and a cause of a public health problem.

Why does it matter? Because motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 20. In 2023 alone, more than 5,500 fatalities involved young drivers. That’s why Lowrey thinks it’s critical to evaluate whether public safety laws are truly working — and to improve them when they’re not. 

“It’s arguably unethical to pass a law that’s supposed to protect people that actually doesn’t,” she said. “Policy evaluation research helps to ensure that the laws that we have in place to protect people are actually doing so — and in that way, we enhance public trust in our governance, and we enhance public trust in public health.” 

In a new video Q&A, Lowrey shares how legal research can help save lives and why evidence-based policymaking is essential to protecting the next generation. 

Questions

What does legal epidemiology reveal about how laws can shape public health and safety?

We know that law has the ability to change both individual and corporate behavior, and also to shift societal norms in a way that improves health and safety in our country,” she said, pointing to examples from sanitary laws passed in the 19th century as well as clean indoor air laws in the 1970s. “I always show this slide when I’m giving presentations of kids smoking in a high school cafeteria. There was only a federal law that prohibited that as of 1994, so it wasn’t that long ago that kids were smoking in school — and we wouldn’t even think of that as a thing these days, and a lot of that is because of the impact of law to shift the way we think about these behaviors that really impact our health.

Your team built a dataset of licensing laws across all 50 states. What can policymakers and licensing agencies do with that information?

We hope that that researchers will be able to take the data and to figure out what specific aspects, for example, of provisional restrictions seem to be most protective for young drivers,” she said. “Is it nighttime restriction? Is it a passenger restriction? Is it the length of time that a state makes a new driver hold a provisional before they can get a full license?

On the policy maker side and for state driver licensing administrators, we hope that they’ll use the data to compare themselves and compare their state policies to those in similarly situated states — states that are surrounding them or that are similar to them in size and demographics — in order to really make sure that they’re innovating, that they’re using best practices.