Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004 | 11:17 a.m.
Nevada beats most states in the quality of its traffic safety laws, according to a national report released today by the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
The report, "A Roadmap to State Highway Safety Laws," looks at each state's laws on impaired driving, teenage driving and adult and child restraints.
Nevada has enacted good or average laws in 13 of the 16 areas the report looked at and fully meets every recommendation by the group in impaired driving, child restraint or booster seats and motorcycle helmets.
Only California rated higher with 14 laws. Nevada tied for second with Washington, North Carolina, Maine and Georgia.
The worst states, according to the report, were Wyoming and Alaska, which have enacted only four of the 16 laws.
Like many other states in the report, Nevada is weakest when it comes to its seat belt law and its laws on teenage driving, according to Advocates, a group of insurance companies and consumer, health, safety and law enforcement agencies working to promote driver safety.
"I think it's pretty wild that Nevada came out as well as it did," said Erin Breen, director of the Safe Community Partnership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "It's lovely to be on the right side of the rankings for a change."
The laws are working, too, Breen said. There were 19 fewer traffic fatalities in 2003 than in 2002.
"That doesn't sound like a very big deal, but when you think of the people who are moving here, when you think of the increases in population, it is," Breen said. "Our fatality rate is going down, and that is important."
While the report complained about the rising number of traffic deaths nationally in 2002, Chuck Abbott, director of the Nevada Highway Traffic Safety Office, said the fatality count fell from a record 381 in 2002 to 362 deaths last year. He said the 2003 figure is preliminary because more fatalities could be reported later.
Deaths in vehicle accidents in Nevada dropped from 283 to 261 in 2003 but pedestrian fatalities rose from 57 to 65 in 2003. Preliminary analysis shows Nevada will probably surpass the 138 alcohol-related deaths in 2002, Abbott said.
Teenage fatalities are also up, from 28 to 31 this year.
Abbott said motorcycle deaths fell from 34 to 25 last year.
The fatality rate would go down even more if Nevada implemented some of the laws the report pushes, such as a law that allows police to pull drivers over for failing to wear seat belts and more restrictions on teenage drivers, Abbott and Breen said.
"Those are definitely the legislation we have zeroed in on as critical for us," Abbott said. "If we could get more people to wear seat belts we could reduce the fatalities by a third. Almost 65 percent of those who died were not wearing seat belts."
Nevada law enforcement officers may only write a ticket to someone for not wearing a seat belt if that individual has first been pulled over for another violation.
Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Timothy Beckett, who works with fatality investigations, said the state should consider toughening its seat belt laws.
"Statistics show that restrained drivers are injured more, but they live more," he said.
The Nevada Highway Patrol fatal investigations unit responded to 77 fatal crashes in 2003 that resulted in 85 deaths, Beckett said. In those 26 people were not wearing seat belts, he said.
Nevada still needs to beef up its laws on teen drivers, Breen said, especially further restricting when teens can transport other teens.
"We don't have enough time for novice drivers to practice," Breen said. "If you look at teenage crash rates, crashes happen when teenagers have other teenagers with them and after midnight."
When teenagers transport other teenagers, they are more likely to be distracted, speed and show off, Breen said.
"With just one kid in the car, their likelihood of getting into a crash goes up 300 percent," Breen said.
Currently, a driver over 16 in Nevada can transport other teenagers after 60 days of receiving the license. Breen thinks that law needs to be extended to at least six months.
Breen said she'd also like to see a ban on night driving between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. except for school or work, as recommended by the report. At minimum, the curfew already in effect for teenagers should be enforced, Breen said.
Sen. Barbara Cegavske (R-Las Vegas), who has proposed such legislation in the past, agreed.
"Parents need to realize that there needs to be curfews for their children," she said. "Children don't need to be out all night driving. I wouldn't be opposed to the parents getting a ticket if their children are caught driving past curfew. It's very frustrating because that's when most of the teenagers' fatal accidents occur -- at night."
Cegavske brought up the death of 16-year-old Dustin Hall, who died after he crashed his car at Vegas Valley Drive and Hollywood Boulevard at 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning.
Hall was at home sleeping when when several friends, two boys and three girls, called him for help after they got stuck four-wheeling in the desert.
Moments after Hall picked up his friends, he lost control of his 1994 Dodge Dakota. The speeding car veered off the road, hit a cement barrier and flipped, Metro Detective Bill Redfairn said.
Cegavske said this incident could have been prevented with curfew laws.
"What a tragedy it was when that 16-year-old died trying to help out his friends," Cegavske said. "Why were those kids out so late at night? Where were their parents? Why don't they have a curfew?"
Cegavske has proposed to toughen the graduated driver's license law in previous legislative sessions, but failed after some opponents argued that the restrictions would cause difficulty for parents in rural areas.
She plans to re-introduce her proposal in 2005, she said.
Those against the law were concerned that the graduated license would pose an inconvenience for parents.
John Carpenter, R-Elko, voted against the initiative in 2001.
"You have to give young adults some responsibility," he said at the time. "It seemed too restrictive not only in rural areas but also for kids in Las Vegas. They need to transport members in their own family. There are a lot of rural areas in Clark and Washoe counties. I thought what we had was a reasonable compromise that enabled kids to still function."
Nevada's impaired driving laws met all of the guidelines in the report, but Breen said the state Legislature will be looking at a law in 2005 to strengthen its driving under the influence regulations for repeat offenders.
As the law stands now, DUIs are felonies only on every third incident, Breen said, meaning fourth and fifth incidents are only misdemeanors.
"We want it to be once a felon, always a felon," Breen said.
All of the traffic laws, however, do little good if there are not enough police to enforce them, she said.
"You can have letter perfect laws but if you don't have enough law enforcement to enforce them people are still going to disobey them," Breen said.
Sun reporter
Cy Ryan contributed to this report.
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