Barnes fight resumes in Senate on teen driving
2001 GEORGIA LEGISLATURE
Kathey Pruitt - Staff
Sunday, March 11, 2001

Gov. Roy Barnes will try again Monday to win lawmakers' support for a metro Atlanta no-drive zone for unsupervised 16-year-olds.

And he's hoping the state Senate is more receptive than the House, which last month ripped his plan to raise the solo driving age in 18 counties out of Barnes' highway safety package.

The governor's floor leaders will ask a Senate committee Monday to add the higher metro Atlanta driving age back into the bill. But how far Barnes is willing to compromise remains to be seen.

Sen. Steve Thompson (D-Powder Springs) confirms that the governor is still fighting for the age increase and will propose its inclusion in the bill. But he won't say whether Barnes will alter the number of counties he'll try to cover.

"It appears we have bipartisan support, most especially in urban areas," Thompson said. "I'm encouraged we'll have an opportunity for the issue to at least be debated again."

House leaders have maintained for weeks that Barnes is canvassing for potential support for a much smaller 16-year-old no-drive zone covering only the four largest Atlanta area counties: Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett. Those were the only counties the governor mentioned by name when he first unveiled his proposal. But when Barnes introduced the bill, it covered 14 additional counties that local lawmakers insist don't have suburban Atlanta's teen driving problems.

In the two weeks since the streamlined highway safety bill --- which now deals only with drunken driving and open container laws and a new crime of aggressive driving --- cleared the House, the governor has been busy. His meetings with Republican leaders, many representing fast-growing suburban areas, have produced a new set of allies.

Senate Minority Leader Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said the Senate Republican caucus will support Barnes' effort to keep 16-year-olds, no matter where they live, from driving alone in parts of metro Atlanta. But he acknowledged that getting all lawmakers on board may be easier if Barnes asks, as some lawmakers expect, to cover only the largest metro Atlanta counties.

"We'd always supported four counties,'' Johnson said. "The fewer the counties, the easier it is for everybody. My suspicion is that has been part of his strategy all along."

Barnes' teen driving initiative --- patterned after a New York law that makes teens wait two years to drive solo in the city --- is but one of several efforts to curb teenage driving deaths. But critics say it's misdirected. In the state House, lawmakers who opposed the idea said it doesn't take into consideration the fact that rural parts of the state are even riskier for young drivers.

Nearly two-thirds of teen driving accidents in the past four years were in more rural parts of the state, rather than the 18 counties Barnes is targeting, according to House researchers. Atlanta safe driving advocates say about 40 percent of Georgia's more than 300 teen driving fatalities in 1997-99 occurred in metro Atlanta.

"It would be helping kids in those counties to some extent,'' said Rob Foss, senior researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's highway safety research center. "It would just leave out the ones in the rural areas that need it just as much."

The Senate already has approved legislation requiring drivng instruction, imposing nighttime driving restrictions and limiting teens to a single unrelated passenger during their first two years of driving. Highway safety experts say those measures, particularly driving curfews and passenger limits, are the most critical to stopping teen driving fatalities.