Class helps teens handle tough road conditions

By Emily Richmond

Saturday, April 2, 2005 | 9:17 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

April 2 - 3, 2005

With the ink on his driver's license less than two days old, Jeff Payne, then 16 years old, loaded up his tan 1977 Camaro with three friends and headed off for a high school football game.

The joyride ended when Payne stopped paying attention to the road and ran into another car. No one was injured but it was a while before Payne was back behind the wheel.

In hindsight Payne, now 37 and a professional driving instructor at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, knows how lucky he was.

"I had a brand-new license, the car was full of other teenagers and I was driving at night," said Payne of the wreck that occurred in his hometown of Whittier, Calif. "I did everything the textbook now tells us contributes to teen traffic fatalities."

Driver's Edge, created by Payne in 2002, has taught more than 2,000 teenagers how to handle difficult road conditions.

Circumstances have only become more challenging for young drivers, with the additional distractions of newer technology such as CD players and cellular phones, Payne said. And while the driver's education program at Payne's high school consisted mostly of cruising the parking lot in the Spanish teacher's AMC Pacer, it was still better than nothing.

And nothing is exactly what many of Nevada's young drivers get.

"We throw them to the wolves," said Payne of the state's minimal driver's education requirements. "We need a truly legitimate licensing system in this state. The laws need to be in place and those laws need to be enforced."

Parental responsibility plays a significant role, Payne said. Most young drivers couldn't afford to drive if a vehicle wasn't provided for them, Payne said.

In a May 2002 wreck near Las Vegas High School, 15-year-old Ashley Troester lost control of a 1987 Ford Thunderbird her father had purchased for her. Troester, who died of injuries suffered in the wreck along with her friend Natasha Keeter, had neither a learner's permit nor a license at the time.

Three months later Centennial High School junior Ryan Sneed, 16, ran a stop sign near the campus while driving his younger sister and several of her friends home. Sneed, who had received his driver's license and a brand-new Jeep Cherokee just nine days earlier, was killed.

John Phillips, who runs a private driving school and in 2003 served on a community panel making recommendations to the Legislature, said he supports a graduated driver's license but isn't sure how much of a difference it would really make.

Susan Larimer, whose 16-year-old son was behind the wheel in a fatal drunken driving crash in 2003 that claimed the lives of three of his best friends, testified before the Legislature this year in favor of the graduated license.

"She said if it had been against the law to drive with your peers in the car that (the crash) wouldn't have happened but that's questionable," Phillips said. "He (the driver) drank and drove, so he violated that law. He was out after curfew so he violated that law, too. What's to say he would have honored the law against having other teenagers in the car with him?"