Secretary of State Jesse White is announcing a nearly 60 percent drop in teen driving deaths over the past seven years. Secretary White attributes the decline in teen crash fatalities to his office’s graduated driver licensing program, which was implemented in 2008. It requires new drivers to get more practice time behind the wheel and limits the number of passengers teens can haul around. But, White says they will have work to do.
In the year before the program began, 155 teen drivers died on Illinois roads in a single year. In 2014, that number dropped to 66.