But how can we revoke a license and actually keep someone from behind the wheel?
That is a good point. Look at someone like me. I have a great driving history but lets suppose the unthinkable happens and I am not supposed to drive.
- I can’t drive 30 miles to work
- I can’t pick up my kids from daycare
- I can’t take care of household needs.
There is no public transportation where I live nor transportation for hire. It is a fairly rural street with no sidewalks. My wife works 50 miles in the other direction and can’t get home until 9pm when I have the kids almost in bed.
The only official solution is for us to lose our house or my job and move somewhere close to where I work but far away from where my wife works. That would mean moving the kids to a different school and trying to start a new life for a family of 4 around the fact that I don’t have a drivers license. Tens of thousands of dollars would be lost in the process.
They say that driving is a “privilege” in the U.S. which I suppose is technically true given some meanings of the word but losing it can be worse than a prison sentence for lots of people. I am not saying that the person in question is not at fault but the gravity of the situation can be way beyond any normal privilege if it is lost. You cannot lead a normal life in most of the U.S. by land area without a car or at least a Siamese twin that can drive you everywhere.
Teenagers may only have some of that dependence but, given circumstances that are far from rare, it is closer to a necessity than a privilege.
your argument against is also a very very strong argument for,
if this is your situation and you are to stupid NOT to obey the laws and drive like a sane rational human being then you really really shouldnt be behind the wheel.
I am also in favor of making the drive test more in line with a pilots license. I really dont understand why its so hard to get a license to operate a vehicle that when it crashes virtually NEVER kills anyone not on board at the time, while getting a license to opperate a vehicle that both kills and maims people not on board at all but often does this at no risk to the driver of the car. the test as it stands is something I could easily pass drunk as a skunk.
Let’s be clear on this: it’s not a necessity of modern life. It’s a necessity of modern American suburban life. It just goes to show that there’s something seriously wrong with modern America.
What, exactly? That America is big and spread out, and therefor it isn’t practical to have public transportation everywhere? I fail to see how this is a serious flaw, in fact, the space is one of the most appealing aspects of the US, IMO.
I agree with those that are saying that 16 is fine. Testing should be more rigorous, yes. But you have to learn sometime, and it would make every one’s life much harder if teenagers couldn’t transport themselves anywhere.
In most states, under 18 is a provisional license. Where I got mine, in California, you could drive at 16, but the police, your parents, or pretty much anyone with any authority could get your license taken away if you messed up. I think 16 is a fair age for a provisional license, though I think more extensive training behind the wheel would be great. One of my friends, who was a Mormon, was going to Canada for his mission and he got defensive and extreme conditions driving training before he went, when he was about 17. He got his fill of driving fast and doing scary stuff there, and while he was much more qualified to speed and do stupid stuff without getting hurt than his peers, he almost never did it. I think it was due to his almost wetting his pants when the instructor took him into his first high-speed skid on the skid pad, but that’s just me.
The two situations aren’t really comparable, and safety-wise, I’m not sure it makes much difference. The US has lower fatalities per vehicle km than Japan. The total number of licensed drivers and registered vehicles is far lower, probably around half or less than the US per-capita, and people drive much, much shorter distances and far less often than Americans. Speed limits are really low, as low as 30 kph (18.6 mph) on many streets, 50 kph (31 mph) on major routes, and 80 kph (49.7 mph) on the toll highways, and lower speeds are supposed to reduce fatalities.
This PDF doesn’t give the number of vehicles registered, or the distance traveled, so it’s impossible to compare apples to apples, but it does give total numbers. They aren’t all that great in comparison to the US stats (also PDF). Yes, the total numbers are lower, but consider all the other factors I mentioned above. Even with the higher driving age (which is 18 by the way in my prefecture, not 20) a tough training course requirement, and a driving test that fails about 70% of the people who take it the first time, the numbers aren’t hugely different. If the tougher requirements and higher ages made a difference, those numbers should be much lower than they are.
Besides, you’ve driven here, you know what the drivers are like. I have used all my defensive driving skills more times than I care to think about in avoiding accidents. I’ve been in one accident in the six years I’ve been here, and it was because the guy hit me from the side while blowing through a red light. The last accident I had was a fender-bender in a parking lot 13 years prior to that.
This is true, but there are plenty of places in America where the population density is high enough that it would be practical to have decent public transportation—and yet they still don’t. Yes, we will always need more private transportation than many other countries have, but we don’t really need to depend on private transportation to the extreme extent that we currently do.
As a result of this extreme dependence, massive numbers of people, as Shagnasty points out, would be absolutely screwed if they suddenly found themselves unable to drive. One moment of carelessness behind the wheel resulting in a bad accident and a suspended license, or one inconvenient injury or disability that temporarily disqualifies you from operating a car, and boom, your entire life just ceases to function. Yes, I would agree with scr4 that this is a serious problem in our society.
My dad got a license in Michigan at 14.
But me and my spouse and all my kids got more accidents between license and age 20 then the many years since then.
I doubt people would want kids to wait for 20, but perhaps with limits as to hours and number of passengers a longer wait would work.
I’ll be sure to use that same arguement in court to avoid going to prison. “But your Honor, I need to be free to live my life as I always have.” I have no sympathy for people who lose their license due to bad driving. Why? Because it is my life, my family’s life, and my friends life you put at risk when you (yet again) change lanes without signalling or (yet again) run a stop sign.
As for the arguement that you can’t live your life without your car - THAT’S YOUR OWN GODDAM FAULT! You made your life dependent on your car which 99.99999999999% of us do. Suppose I give you a private plane and tell you it’s yours to use but I can take it back at anytime if you fly too dangerously. You proceed to get a great job 500 mi away, buy a getaway cabin miles away from any road, etc but after a series of midair near collisions I decide to take the plane back. Are you going to say that it is unfair because you’ve created a life centered around that plane? They told you when you got your license that it is revokable given certain circumstances so for you to want to change the rules because they’re inconvienent to you, TFB!
That’s fine and I don’t disagree with you on most of it but let’s say that they passed a strict law that prohibited 50% of the driving public from driving anymore for some technical or safety reason due to increased standards. American society would cease to function because we don’t have the infrastructure to support large numbers of non-drivers. Those that don’t are largely shut-ins because of it unless they live in one of the very few areas where public transportation can sustain a supposedly normal lifestyle.
Most people can’t decide to live in Manhattan, downtown Boston, or San Francisco simply because most people that need such a thing aren’t millionaires. The quality of transportation drops off in a steep curve after that to the point where even huge cities like Dallas and Phoenix don’t provide public transportation that can support an average person for a normal life.
Take a look at a big U.S. map sometime. Make a mental circle of the real areas (not just the cities and suburb boundaries themselves) where you think public transportation could support a normal lifestyle for someone. I have done it myself and my best guess was less than 1% of the U.S. by land area and maybe much less.
Of course some people need their drivers license revoked. What my point is that throwing out the word privilege is a little bit silly seeing that calling public water a privilege would probably be less burdensome if it was just taken away based on some standard.
As Shagnasty notes, however, whether or not you make your life dependent on your car depends partly on what kind of practical alternatives you have. The availability of transit for the most part isn’t a personal decision, it’s a social decision.
(And just to nitpick, that percentage is actually somewhere between about 90% and 95%. The number of adult Americans who don’t own cars, and thus don’t make their lives dependent on their cars, is definitely a small minority but it’s not as small as you suggest. I know you were exaggerating for rhetorical effect—since by your numbers, there would only be about 0.003 non-car-owners in the entire US :)—but it’s worth pointing out that this subset of the population isn’t as insignificantly tiny as many people automatically assume.)
I think it is a serious flaw, becuase:
[ul]
[li]Given the same technology, personal transport consumes more energy and release more pollutants (including CO2) than public transport.[/li][li]Reliance on cars is unhealthy; it eliminates almost all need for walking, contributing to obesity. [/li][li]It discriminates against those who cannot drive. It puts a huge burden on parents, who have to transport their children. It also puts a burden on those with elderly and disabled family members.[/li][li]Being dependent on parents for transportatin until age 16 is hardly the way to teach independence. A junior-high school student in Japan, for example, can easily travel across the country by himself/herself. [/li][li]Drunk driving isn’t going away if the only way to get to a bar is by car.[/li][li]If you make cars a necessity, that means bad drivers have to drive. Elderly people with failing eyesights, illegal immigrants, those with suspended licenses who still need a car to get to work, people who can’t afford to maintain their cars properly, etc. [/li][li]Over 40,000 deaths per year. That’s the price of our dependence on cars. [/li][/ul]
And it’s not just the fact that houses are spread out over a wide area. It’s how they are spread. In most other countries, suburbs grow around public transport. Train stations form the nucleus of well-defined community centers where stores and other local businesses are concentrated. American suburbs are more decentralized, so even if you were to put a bus system, there’s no well-defined destination for the buses.
I live in American suburbs, if i lived in American cities, my position may very well be the same regardless if I personally needed the car because I could also think outside my box and realize, as has been pointed, that other people do need these cars, well, need them, if not me. I don’t think there’s anything “seriously wrong” with modern America because we live in a larger bubble, on average, than other people.
I think teen drivers are bad drivers not because they’re only so many years old, but because they’re new drivers. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was… 23? 24? And I was a horrible driver for the next few years (actually I’m a bad driver still).
If you raise the age, you’ll suddenly “notice” that 19- & 20-year-olds “aren’t that good either,” & you’ll have all these kids in college just learning to drive. It’s a horrible idea that does nothing for road safety.
You tall enough to reach the pedals? Fine. Start learning now. In a few years, you’ll be decent at it.
I think you ought to be able to drink at 16 and get a drivers license at 20. Get all that drunken crazyness out of the way BEFORE they start to drive, not DURING.
Shoot, these days, most of the 16 year olds won’t get jobs, anyway. They just drive because they’re too lazy to take the bus to the mall.
The biggest problem, actually, aside from 16-1/2 and 17 year olds driving and drinking is these horrifically high-powered cars they get. My ex-brother in law bought his daughter a Jeep Grand Cherokee when sh got her license (I should have so much trouble with money). Within a month she’d driven it into a traffic barrier and wrecked it. Reason? Trying to pass someone else while talking on her cell phone and stepping on the gas too hard.
Judging by the responses in the thread about speeding, I think 50 would be about right.
Whatever age we make it possible to get a license, it is about a year before the kid is really ready to drive. That’s because it takes practice, and no amount of driving schools and learners permits give enough. I say this having gone through it with two kids, both of whom have done very well.
I think the provisional license system in California is very good. After the learner’s permit, you are obligated to get in a certain number of hours driving with a parent in the car. After the license, for six months or a year (it has changed since my kids got theirs’) you can’t drive at night or with other kids in the car. This cuts down the chances for problems, and most of my daughters’ friends held to the rules.
When I was a kid, NYC had the age set to 17, and worse, you couldn’t even drive with a learner’s permit in the city until 17. My father, being law abiding, took me miles away to Suffolk County to practice. Getting in a few hours a week did not make me a better driver. I don’t know if that is still the rule, but it was stupid. Not having a license until 17 was not big deal since we had loads of public transportation, even in the wilds of Queens.