Raising the Driving Age

Well, I do find it bizarre that you can drive at 16 but can't vote until 18 or drink until 19 (or at least those are the ages in Ontario). If anything, I'd rather have 16-year-olds voting and drinking than driving.

I can't see any reason that it should be so much harder for our kids to get a license than it was for us. Maybe there are some stats somewhere that support the delay, I'm not sure. Speaking purely from personal experience though, my teens are more responsible and more aware than we ever were at that age.

Sure there are kids who are going to be invincible and who are going to push the envelope. There always will be. There's adults too who shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel.

I would like to see mandatory professional driving instruction offered free in high school. That way each child would get a chance to learn how to drive properly, without being taught all their parents bad habits. And they would have to prove that they had learned something before they were granted a license. It's the time behind the wheel and the quality of the education that counts, not the number of days you have to drive with an L on your back window or the amount of hoops you have to jump through.

I'd prefer to just see the testing requirements hugely increased, and the penalties for poor driving increased as well. Retest every 5 years as well (with a rigorous retest). Probably 30% of current license holders shouldn't be on the roads, and that should be reflected in the testing and enforcement.

And if you ever hurt somebody as a result of poor driving, you never drive again.

Agreed Fidel but everyone says we are dreaming and it is impossible.
I guess they think it is more fun polluting!

Where I am, not the lake I am on but a lot of others there is a growing problem of blue-green algae infestation. A human cause, and now I read they are trying to blame it on the Beaver!

Next step make the beavers extinct. Pour a lot of money into that.

quote:

---

Originally posted by remind:
[b]
However, workplace injury stats also show that young people, new on the job, are injured on the job are injured at a much higher rate than than older employees, should young people be barred from working until thet are older too?[/b]

---

Young people should certainly not be working in dangerous environments. At 17 I was hired to drive a moving truck that had failing brakes and malfunctioning steering. I should not have been driving a 5 ton truck at 17, and had I been older I would not have driven an unsafe truck at all.

quote:

---

Originally posted by remind:
[b]
Frankly, I believe the graduated driving scheme is racially biased, as opposed to age biased.[/b]

---

Why do you believe that?

I could see it being [i]class[/i] biased (and since class tends to overlap with race, it would consequently be somewhat race biased as well) since people whose parents are sufficiently well-off to afford a car have more chance to practice and thus a better chance of getting their license sooner.

So this may be a stroke against it. The question arises, what if it [i]is[/i] race or class biased, but produces a significant improvement in road safety and the environment?

I'd be inclined to say yes. One suggestion I read somewhere (maybe here) was that you could drink at 16 but not be able to drive till you were 18. The idea would be that by the time you could drive you'd have gotten your worst excesses with booze out of the way, and thus be less likely to drive when really hammered.

On the other hand, there is another drawback for raising the age and/or the requirements to drive- namely that it would disproportionately hurt rural youth (since you can't just hop on a bus if you live in a place like Dauphin or Meaford). In spite of this, though, I'd still tend to favour it.

quote:

---

Originally posted by remind:
[b]

Concur with you Polly, and the accident stats do show that younger drivers are involved in more car accidents than older drivers.

However, workplace injury stats also show that young people, new on the job, are injured on the job are injured at a much higher rate than than older employees, should young people be barred from working until thet are older too?

Frankly, I believe the graduated driving scheme is racially biased, as opposed to age biased.[/b]

---

Interesting. I wonder whether the higher accident rates are due to age or simply inexperience from being new to the job. I.e. - is a 25 year old in her first year operating heavy machinery or what have you less likely to be injured than a 16 year old in the first year?

Same thing with driving. There's a clear correlation between age and inexperience here. I had a small accident about 3 months after getting my license. It involved me, a windy road and a concrete barrier. I didn't slow down enough and I scraped the car against the barrier. I don't think that was due my age - I think it was the fact that I misjudged how fast I could go in the turn because I wasn't used to driving in the rain.

The advantage to learning at 16 instead of 18 or 19 is that the teenager is probably living at home at that age and parents likely have a greater deal of control on the use of the car. Also, as Jrose has already pointed out, in graduated licensing systems (BC, Ontario, others) most people don't get a full license until about 2 years after they get their learners/G1(or whatever it's called in Ontario - I always get the G's mixed up)

I'd be interested to hear why you believe the graduated licensing system is racially biased as well, Remind.

quote:

---

Originally posted by remind:
[b]It was suggested that Canadian children picked up driving skills from watching their parents drive ...[/b]

---

In that case, I should be dead by now. Dad was an awful driver. I'd have to remind him we were driving on the soft shoulder of the highway and spitting stones at other cars in the middle of one of his lectures on the price of gold or what he was going to do when he retired. It was generally and usually a white nuckle experience for all but him until swerving back into an arbitrary lane of traffic or another.

The data are a bit dated [url=http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/ncsa/809-100.pdf](see figure 10 on page 37)[/url] but experience on the road does not account for the consistently higher blood alcohol content the lower the age of the driver. And alcohol in the blood is probably the most significant factor in causing accidents.

Like I said in an earlier post above, raising the minimum age for a license will only delay the time a person can start getting experience driving. But, immaturity and the sense of immortality common among young drivers would be addressed by having the minimum age limit raised.

So, again, I think the question remains: Is it acceptable to have tens of thousands of accidents and a couple of thousand fatalities that could be avoided had the minimum driver’s age been raised?

Personally, I wouldn't change the minimum age. Accidents and deaths are part of living in a complex society.

[ 14 August 2007: Message edited by: Sven ]

Ya! And we can lower that age limit for voting too. My young nephews in Ottawa understand Canadian politics the same or better than most 50 and 60 and 70 year-olds.

I'm rather disturbed by the on-going push to infantilize our teens. Why are they any less capable than we were? Why do we need to keep them dependent?

[i]edited for sp.[/i]