Increasing the safety of young drivers

• In 2008, young drivers were involved in around 37 percent of all fatal crashes and 37 percent of all serious injury crashes.
• Crashes where young drivers were deemed at fault resulted in 122 deaths and 800 serious injuries in 2008. The social cost of these crashes was approximately $1.1 billion.
• Our 15–17 year olds have the highest road death rate in the OECD.

How can we improve the safety of young drivers?

Raise the driving age to 16 or 17 and extend the length of the learner licence period to 12 months
The Land Transport (Driver Licensing) Amendment Bill is currently before Parliament. The Bill proposes raising the minimum driving age to 16 years and extending the length of the learner licence period from six to twelve months. We are interested in your views on this and whether the minimum driving age should be increased to 16 or 17 years old.

Strengthen the restricted licence test to encourage 120 hours of supervised driving practice
If the learner licence period is extended, we could also encourage young people to have more supervised practice by strengthening the restricted licence test.

Raise public awareness of young driver crash risk and the graduated driver licensing system restrictions
This would better explain why we have licence conditions for novice drivers (eg restrictions on night-time driving and carrying peer passengers) and why drivers should follow these conditions.

Increase the benefit of professional driver training
We could require that the content of professional driver training courses be in line with best practice, have a greater practical component, and provide incentives for young people to do more training.

Increase the benefit of school road safety education
We could develop a specific road safety education programme for secondary schools. It could complement professional driver training. 

Introduce vehicle impoundment for drivers in breach of the graduated driver licensing system licence conditions
Police could impound the vehicle driven by a young driver for 28 days if they are caught breaching the graduated driver licensing system licence conditions twice in a three-month period.

Introduce compulsory third party insurance
Compulsory insurance could ensure that everyone who might cause damage to other people’s property can pay for it, eg drivers who have a higher crash risk could pay more in insurance to reflect that greater risk. Recent research found that the level of vehicle insurance in New Zealand is comparable to countries with compulsory vehicle insurance schemes, so the benefits will need to be closely looked at.

Introduce vehicle restrictions
We could ban the use of certain powerful vehicles for young people.

Download the full section on areas of high concern (PDF v7.0, 935kb)

Download the full discussion document (PDF v7.0, 2.50mb)