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Stickers Will Identify Provisional Licensed Drivers
By Keith Hagarty
The following is an addendum to our fourpart special series on teen driving. To read past installments, please visit our Web site at www.micromediapubs.com.
Vehicles operated by teens with a provisional driver's license can be easily identified, now that the Jackson Police Department announced the availability of rear window vehicle stickers.
Available at the Police Department, the free stickers are designed to alert law enforcement of a driver with the restrictions of a provisional license.
An individual must be at least 17 years old to take and pass the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission's road test, getting a provisional license. Such a license includes restrictions on occupancy and curfew. The driver must then complete one year of unsupervised driving and be at least 18 years old for an unrestricted license.
Stickers will now identify such drivers on the road.
Developed between the Police Department and township council, Jackson is the first municipality to institute such a sticker identification program.
The state will keep a close eye on the program to gauge its effectiveness, said Pamela S. Fischer, the director of the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety.
"We're looking at everything, so we can come up with recommendations that are going to make sense and that can be put in place here in New Jersey to improve the system," said Fischer.
Formed in March, the state's Teen Driver Study Commission was created as a series of open forums to assess the state of teenage driving throughout the state, and make recommendations to improve safety on the roadways.
"We have a good graduated driver's license (GDL) law, it's got some of the most essential components that we know through research can affect positive change," said Fischer. "We know that if you reduce passengers in the car with a teen driver, it reduces crashes. We know if you restrict night-time driving, it helps reduce crashes too because it's the most dangerous time on the road for everybody."
Jackson officials and police representatives recently met with the commission and law enforcement panel to discuss their provisional sticker program.
"We certainly applaud the community coming together on this, but our concern is that it needs to be addressed at the state level," said Fischer. "The commission is looking at this. We're trying to come up with how best to identify teens. I don't want to say 'tag' or 'flag' teens, but that is really what we're talking about here, so that you clearly know as a law enforcement officer if there's a teen behind the wheel of that car."
One of the sticking points to the program is mutual enforcement between towns, according to Fischer.
"We haven't figured this out yet, because if you have one town doing one thing and one town doing another, let's face it, we're a very mobile society, with teens moving from town to town," she said. "If you got multiple identifiers, then it's just going to cause confusion for the law enforcement community. So we need to come up with one system."
A similar program had been used for decades in England, Australia and British Columbia, Canada. A reflectorized placard is affixed to the vehicle identifying new drivers.
"It's an 'L' placard for the learning permit phase, and a 'P' placard for the provisional license phase, and it's on the front and back of the car," she said. "It clearly delineates that there is someone potentially behind the wheel who is in that GDL phase and they've had this system in place for over 40 years with an over 85 percent compliance rate."
"We're looking very carefully at the three countries- Canada, UK and Australia- because they have a track record of using these, and they have success with them," said Fischer. "I think we can learn a lot from other countries that have been doing this for a lot longer than we have."
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