CLIFTON, N.J. — It is a rite of American teendom, celebrated in popular culture by “American Graffiti” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”: a teenager with a driver’s license piling as many friends as will fit into the car for a ride. 
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Megan Lavery, 17, has appeared in televised messages about those laws.
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But increasingly, states are legislating away that carefree cruise, passing laws that restrict when, how and with whom teenagers can get behind the wheel.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia now prohibit teenagers from driving with another teenager, and all but seven states forbid them from driving with more than one. In South Carolina, teenagers cannot drive after 6 p.m. in winter (8 p.m. in summer), and in Idaho, they are banned from sundown to sunup.
Here in New Jersey, which has long had the nation’s highest licensing age, 17, lawmakers are pushing further, requiring teenage drivers to attach a red decal to their license plates to make it easier for the police to enforce a curfew and passenger restrictions, and proposing a law to require even parents to complete a driver education course.
The laws have raised complaints that the state is outsourcing parenting to the police — not to mention that passenger limits effectively outlaw the teenage double date.
But safety campaigners point to studies showing that the laws have significantly reduced traffic deaths and call them a natural extension for a generation that has grown up protected by sport utility strollers and bicycle helmet laws.
“I have one son; I have done everything I can to get him this far in life,” said Pam Fischer, who is a safety campaigner pressing for stricter laws in New Jersey, and whose son will take the test for his probationary driver’s license this week. “I’m not just going to throw him the keys.”
Car crashes remain the leading cause of death for teenagers, who have a crash rate four times higher than that of older drivers. And two-thirds of those deaths happen in a car driven by another teenager.
Studies have shown that teenagers tend to overrate their driving skills and underrate risks on the road, and have more trouble multitasking — talking to friends, listening to the radio and texting are particularly hazardous. Teenage drivers’ risk of a crash increases 44 percent with one teenage passenger, and quadruples with three or more.
The push to restrict teenage drivers dates to the mid-1990s, when states, starting with Florida, began passing laws providing for graduated driver’s licenses, which require periods of supervision and probationary driving before teenagers can get a full license.
Now, all states have graduated driver’s licensing — North Dakota, the last holdout, began requiring it in January. But most states are revisiting these laws to make them tougher; 29 have done so since 2009, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry-financed group.
Mostly, they are further restricting the number of passengers or tightening curfews. And increasingly, they are also banning cellphone use even with headsets and tying drivers’ licenses to school attendance. The restrictions generally do not apply to new drivers over 21.
Efforts have been particularly aggressive in the bumper-to-bumper Northeast. Bills requiring a decal like New Jersey’s are pending in New York and Rhode Island. Last year, Pennsylvania passed a one-teenage-passenger restriction and imposed the nation’s strictest requirements for practice driving, 65 hours. And an effort to ease Connecticut’s ban on teenage passengers, by allowing teenagers to drive siblings, failed in March.
At the federal level, the highway bill passed this summer set up incentives for states to tighten restrictions on teenage drivers, with particular encouragement to impose stricter limits on the number of passengers and the hours teenagers can drive, to ban cellphone use and to extend the restrictions to age 18 in states where they end earlier.
“We don’t want to say that teens are a menace to us all, but the reality is, when teen drivers crash, it’s people in other cars or teen passengers who end up dying,” said Justin McNaull, director of state relations for AAA, which endorses passenger limits to age 21 or even 25.
“You go back to ‘Grease’ and ‘American Graffiti’ to understand the love of youngsters and their vehicles. But we understand now so much better the risks that are involved.”
The experience of New Jersey, considered one of the models for strict laws on teenage driving, shows how those laws have evolved.
The state imposed its graduated license in 2001, limiting teenagers to one passenger with an exemption for household members. Finding that suddenly cars driven by teenagers were full of “cousins,” the state tightened the law in 2009, disallowing even siblings. But a state commission found that police officers were reluctant to enforce the law, and that teenagers knew it.
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