Why the Driving Age Must Stay at 16
If you’re like most Americans, you
probably still remember the day you received your very first driver’s license.
And who wouldn’t? Driving around with your best friends while blasting your
favorite songs on the radio makes you feel invincible. Earning your license is
the first major step into adulthood. Something as essential to everyday living
as driving is a privilege necessary for sixteen-year-olds.
There are some people, however, who like to point a
finger at all teenage drivers and blame their immaturity for vehicle accident fatalities.
Such a claim is outrageously unfair to the percentage of sixteen and
seventeen-year-olds whose maturity far surpasses the expectations of someone
their age. I’m sure that we have all met some teenager before who acts more
like a thirty-year-old than your actually thirty-something-year-old friends. On
the other hand, there are plenty of “adults” out there whose sophistication is
more like that of a middle schooler. But this factor never comes into play when
said immature adult goes to renew their license on their twenty-first or
twenty-fifth birthdays. So how can we possibly deny teenagers their driving privilege
based on their assumed maturation, when we cannot even prove that all our older
drivers also contain that same level of responsibility?
Learning to
drive a two ton metal death machine would be scary at any age. Practice makes
perfect and sometimes learning the hard way is actually the best way. Sure,
sixteen-year-olds have the highest rates of teenage passenger deaths per
licensed driver and per mile driven (Institute for Highway Safety). But driving
around town with a large yellow sign indicating that you are a first timer, and
a professional driving instructor in the passenger seat with his foot always
right next to the back-up brake could never possibly prepare you for every situation
you will meet on the road. According to Forbes.com, the average
driver will file a claim for a collision about once every 17.9 years, and there
are about ten million accidents in the U.S every
year. Hold for the good news. The National Safety Council has done the
research to prove that in 2009, just three of every one thousand accidents
involved fatalities. So what can we take from this? Car accidents are
completely unavoidable. Just think about all the people close to you who have
been in a collision in the last five years. But we can also learn from this that
very, very few car accidents actually claim a life. Thus, it is quite unwarranted
for us to strip teens of their ability to drive in an attempt to stop something
as inescapable as car accidents.
In addition to the obvious
complainants (teenagers who would have to wait an extra two or more years to
earn their driver’s license), parents feel pretty strongly about this matter. “In
an era where free time is a commodity, parents just don’t have the option of
driving their children around. Until the state gets a viable mass transit
system, that issue won’t go away.” Here, the author of the editorial, Driving
Age Should Stay at 16, published in a February issue of the Northern Star,
makes a convincing argument that most parents just don’t have the time of day
to haul their teenagers around when they have their own commitments to take
care of. Responsibilities such as their jobs, housework, grocery shopping, and
paying the family’s bills all require a lot of time and effort, leaving these
busy and fatigued parents little to no time to cart their teenagers to school,
sporting events, and their part-time jobs. Raising the legal driving age to
eighteen would rob not only teenagers, but also their parents of their freedom.
Earning your driver’s license is
something that most of us are eventually going to do just because it is
absolutely essential to our everyday lives. It is unfair and unreasonable to
assume that all teenagers are too irresponsible to take on a task as serious as
driving a car. And while many teenagers are involved in car accidents, so are
plenty of adults. Sometimes lessons just have to be learned the hard way. When
parents and teens are as busy as they are nowadays with school, work, and
everything in between, it is irrational to assume that parents have the time of
day to haul their kids around another two years. It is only sensible for the
legal driving age to remain at sixteen.
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