Tennessee Teens Delay Getting Behind the Wheel

Mackenzie Leake put off learning to drive for almost a year longer than most of her friends. It was out of a sense of self-preservation.

“Every day I went out, I saw some sort of accident or scattered car parts in the middle of the road. A friend said, ‘Oh, I ran into the car in front of me yesterday.’ Everything led me to believe that driving was more dangerous than fun.”

By the time of her junior prom, Mackenzie had confronted her fear of driving. With her dad, she practiced on roads less traveled. He then enrolled her in driving school. A learner’s permit and a driver’s license later, Mackenzie had filmed a wryly humorous documentary about her fear of driving.

She’s part of a trend that turns up among statistics kept by the Tennessee Department of Safety.

The state has known for years that numbers of fatal car crashes among teenage drivers were going down, but a search of the state driver database last week showed more than 70 percent of Shelby County teenagers are waiting to apply for learner’s permits or licenses at least a year later than the 15-year-old age of eligibility for a permit.

The local figures mirror an analysis by the Federal Highway Administration this year showing a drop in numbers of 16-year-olds getting driver’s licenses from 44.7 percent in 1988 to 30.7 percent in 2008.

“There are many more youth today who have other things they value or that are more important,” says Mike Browning, spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Safety. Only 27.9 percent of 15-year-olds in Shelby County had gotten learner permits last year.

The state’s numbers include drivers like Mackenzie, who feared the streets and drivers of Memphis.

Another Memphian, Becca Ballard, 26, got a learner’s permit at 15, but has renewed it 11 years in a row without getting her license.

“I’m afraid of hurting other people,” she says.

The numbers don’t analyze specific reasons for putting off driving, but they include growing numbers of teenagers preoccupied with smart phones and social networking and those with no access to cars because of the cost of vehicles, gasoline, insurance and maintenance.

For Mackenzie, 17, a senior at St. Mary’s Episcopal School, the focus was simply on fear. The title of her documentary (airing at 6:30 p.m. Thursday on WKNO-TV, Channel 10) is “Don’t Make Me Start This Car!”

She came by her fear honestly. Her father, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Craig Leake, admits to his own “debilitating fear” of the narrow lanes of Poplar Avenue. He had lived and driven in New York and Los Angeles.

“When I moved back here, it was like they had decided, ‘Let’s make the lanes a little more narrow and give them SUVs and cell phones.”‘

He and his wife, Linda, helped with filming and editing of their daughter’s documentary. They spent almost a year and a half shooting segments including fender benders and exploded air bags in crashed cars across the city. They found rollover crashes, a motorcycle fatality and crash victims willing to talk while they waited for police or ambulances.

“I thought I was going to die,” says one shaken woman.

In one scene, a classmate tries to console a fearful Mackenzie, telling her, “There’s always a chance you’ll just be sitting around and somebody will hit you. There’s also a chance you’ll be sitting in your living room and somebody will just plow through your front door. There’s danger everywhere.”

Mackenzie enrolled at Maxwell Motorsports and Driving School, where owner Max Maxwell, a former Hollywood stunt driver, says he has seen more teenagers who delay getting permits and licenses out of fear.

“Some of them I think it’s just something they aren’t into,” Maxwell says. “And they don’t mind being squired or chauffeured around by someone else. It’s less stress.”

In the documentary, instructor Richard Herbert, a reserve police officer and former motorcycle cop, tells students about three teenage girls who have died in accidents on Walnut Grove Road. As instructors tell students about parents identifying their children at the morgue, Mackenzie films a tear streaming down the cheek of one driving student.

For Becca Ballard, office manager of a credit-card processing company, the fear of highway mayhem means relying on her husband to drive her to work. She took the driver’s license test only once since getting her learner’s permit. She was “terrified” by the road test and failed.

“They told me to come back in two months,” she says. “That was too long to stew. I didn’t go back.”

Her husband takes her shopping, but, “When I want to go to T.J. Maxx and look around for two hours, he doesn’t want to do that,” says Ballard, who hopes to overcome her fear.

Mackenzie still avoids Poplar and wouldn’t consider using a cell phone while driving. She also avoids freeways: “Everything happens at twice the speed as anywhere else.”

But she did make it to the junior prom. Her date still had no driver’s license, so she drove to the Clark Tower party (on Poplar Avenue) as a well-coiffed chauffeur, a nervous date and a reluctant driver in a single trip.

“I wore my hair in a high bun. Then I hit a speed bump. It crushed my ‘do’ against the roof of the car.”