The complaint I’ve heard voiced about the legislature in Ohio is that, whether you want to make jokes about it or not, there are fewer lawyers who have run for office in the last 15 years than in the past and fewer lawyers, therefore, sitting as lawmakers and more people who are not educated in the law or have practical experience in the law and believe that there needs to be a law to cover every situation imagineable.

For instance, adding the killing of a foster child as a specific reason for being death penalty eligible has been proposed. This type of crime, if one is in favor of the death penalty, is already covered by existing law. Also, the driving under suspension laws recently enacted are not well understood by most judges.

Sorry … got carried away.

[Do we know that this law in particular is going to solve any issue of statistical importance?]

No clue. I guess I’d want data from other states with similar laws.

[We know teen drivers are a problem, but this attacks a specific case with teens and multiple passengers. In order to go about making a law based on this specific behavior it seems to me that we would want something more than anecdotal evidence regardless of how well it appeals to common sense.]

I think the occupation limits are actually a good idea, being suggested for the wrong reasons. I doubt anyone can prove that having more people in a car causes bad driving, but I doubt there’s any way to refute that when a car crashes, more people are likely to be hurt if there are more people in the car.

[We don't have much evidence to prove that this number will improve upon the 9% of all crashes.]

My guess is it won’t. But it will decrease the injury and fatality rates…guaranteed.

[...why not take something that seems common sense and further educate parents rather than put it in as a law...]

Same reason they didn’t do that for seatbelts…it doesn’t work well/fast enough.

We know teen drivers are a problem, but this attacks a specific case with teens and multiple passengers. In order to go about making a law based on this specific behavior it seems to me that we would want something more than anecdotal evidence regardless of how well it appeals to common sense.

That is why I would want more statistical breakdowns of the crashes and how many passengers were in the cars of the teen accidents. We don’t have much evidence to prove that this number will improve upon the 9% of all crashes. If this law goes on the books and creates one less crash per year, is it worth it?

On top of all this, why not take something that seems common sense and further educate parents rather than put it in as a law. If a higher percentage of parents made it a ground rule, you could probably show just as much improvement as having cops ticketing for this.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that the public would want to seek a legal remedy to the increased harm caused by a particulary dangerous group of drivers. What’s your risk hurdle rate for a law to be justified? If your 2%/9% numbers are right, teens are 350% more accident prone than the average driver. That seems like a lot to me. The insurance companies certainly think that teen drivers (or their parents) should pay a sizeable risk premium. Their numbers are probably as good as anybody’s.

We don’t know what the accident rate is, even though we know teens have a disproportionate number of the crashes.

We don’t know how many of the teens cars had more than one passenger.

We don’t know if this counts crashes that occurred as a result of drugs and alcohol, which should be excluded for the purposes of this law because they are ALREADY AGAINST THE RULES.

I feel like this is unsubstantiated (at least from the sources that I found) and is being pushed through by a completely biased source with admitted motivations including their daughter’s legacy.

I don’t know the numbers, so I don’t know what limitations make sense on teen licenses. I can imagine statistics that would merit the kinds of limitations included in this law and worse. If Ohio passed a law making 18 the legal driving age, I’m sure lots of people would be agitating for just the kinds of features this law includes…basically things that let kids get to school or work on their own.

Regarding grief-stricken families pushing laws, I’m not wild about it, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell them to stop. I agree that all the public emotion is irritating, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the law is stupid.