When I was a third-year medical student rotating on the trauma service at Hartford Hospital I learned my first lesson about teenage car crashes.

Shortly after 11 on a cold Friday night, a wet road surface created unsafe driving conditions. A teenage driver failed to anticipate a curve in the road and slammed his parent's car, and his two teenage passengers, into a tree.

The driver was the most severely injured, and was flown by Lifestar to Hartford Hospital. After rapid assessment in the emergency department, he was rushed to the operating room for bleeding from his liver. Despite prompt transport to a Level 1 trauma center and expert surgical care his injuries were not survivable. This is the type of crash that graduated driver licensing laws are put in place to prevent.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers in Connecticut. Systematic evaluation of the circumstances of teenage automobile crashes has taught us that there are certain risk factors which make teenagers twice as likely as older drivers to be involved in fatal car crashes.

Put another way, teenagers represent 6 percent of drivers, but are involved in 14 percent of all fatal crashes. Inexperience, underdeveloped driving skills, and risk-taking behavior place teens that are learning to drive at greater risk than older drivers.

A major risk factor for newly licensed drivers is having other teens in the car. Each additional teenage passenger further increases the crash risk. Driving at night and on weekends is also more hazardous for teens than it is for more experienced drivers.

Graduated driver licensing allows novice teen drivers to gain knowledge, skills and experience under conditions of minimal risk. There are three stages to graduated driver licensing:

• Learner's permit, which allows driving only while supervised by an experienced driver.

• Intermediate license, which allows unsupervised driving under certain restrictions.

• And a full license, with no restrictions.

Research in the United States and Canada has demonstrated conclusively that graduated driver licensing reduces teenage driver crashes and fatalities. The stronger the graduated driver licensing system, the greater the reduction in teenage car crashes that can be achieved.

The three fundamental elements of graduated driver licensing which make it work are:

•Extended holding period for the learner's permit;

•Nighttime driving restrictions;

•And passenger restrictions.

All three of these elements and others are included in the recommendations that were unanimously approved by the Gov. M. Jodi Rell's Task Force on Safe Teen Driving, and are currently being considered by the state legislature.

A survey of Connecticut parents and the general public conducted in January 2008 showed that there was majority support for increased supervised driving hours, longer learner's permit period, longer passenger restriction period, and increased penalties for multiple moving violations. About half of both parents and others support earlier nighttime restriction and increased learner's permit age.

I can tell you from my experience as both a surgeon and a scientist that it is easier to prevent car crash-related injuries in teenagers than it is to treat them. There is widespread public support for strengthening Connecticut's graduated driver licensing laws, and we have strong evidence that these laws are effective.

The parental inconvenience created by graduated driver licensing restrictions is a small price to pay for keeping teenagers alive.