Correlation does not equal causation, dumbass.
You know what the difference is between a 16-year-old driver and a 20-year-old driver? Four years of driving experience. Christ, you don’t actually believe that a person magically becomes a better driver the day they turn 20, do you?
Well, I wasn’t actually arguing that the increased likelihood of accidents and death are what caused the accident. However, if you undertake an activity that tripples your chances of death, and then death occurs, well - perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned. Of course, all I did was present cites and statistics, while you just called me a name. So I guess you win this one.
Um - I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. OF COURSE, the point of this statistic is that experience makes people better drivers. Again - that was the POINT, and exactly why I presented it. Had you followed my link posted earlier, you would even have seen a nice graph illustrating just that, with color and everything. The bottom line is that a 16 year old is the least experienced driver on the road. There are risks associated with that inexperience, and statistics to back that up (which I linked to). But maybe you can call me a name again and that will make all the statistics go away.
So what’s your point? That the 16-year-old shouldn’t be driving? Is he magically going to be a better driver when he’s 17?
I agree with you on this point, and I know it’s more dangerous for teens to be 1. driving 2. at night 3. with friends in the car. But in this particular instance, we don’t have any evidence* that the teens in any way contributed to the accident. It’s that attitude that they are partially responsible for the accident, and the idea that they must have been drinking and/or on drugs, simply because they were teenagers out late, that I object to. I agree that it’s possible to say, “The teens weren’t at fault, but it was a bad idea for them to be out late driving” just as it’s possible for me say, “It’s not my fault that I was attacked, but it was a bad idea to walk down that alley.”
*Yet, though it’s possible that the blood test will show that they were under the influence.
Well - let me try again. The data all points to the fact that 16 year old drivers are at greater risks of accidents and death. This is a result of inexperience, impulsiveness and exposure (not my terms, but from one of my earlier links). There are ways to try and minimize these risks. Examples include graduated driving laws, which can require a certain amount of supervised driving with an adult, limit the hours during which a young driver can operate the vehicle, and/or limit the number of passengers a teen can have in their car. The data shows that young drivers are at greater risks simply by being inexperienced. These risks are made worse by driving at night and by driving with other young passengers.
Now, some of these risks are inherent in learning anything. Inexperience puts you at greater risk when driving, yet you can’t gain experience except by driving. So that risk will always be there. However, other risks (driving at night, driving with other young passengers) can and should be avoided until sufficient experience is gained to off-set these increased risks. That has always been my point. When a 16 year old drives at night with other passengers, he is greatly increasing his chance of being in an accident, of his own death, and of the death of others. There are simple ways to avoid this, and I’m guessing the New Mexico curfew was at least in part a way to address these (I don’t know - just my guess).
I missed the edit window, but wanted to add this: A 17 year old isn’t magically better when he turns 17. He is incrementally better because he has 1 more year of driving experience than he did when he turned 16. In fact, it’s even possible to quantify this. A 16 year old is 2.6 times as likely to be in an accident as a 20 year old. By contrast, a 17 year old is 2.1 times as likely. But this has nothing to do with magic.
I didn’t equate breaking curfew to drinking and driving, which, by the way, is not illegal. I equated breaking curfew with having 2 beers at a restaurant and driving home, which is something that every adult that drinks has done, just like every teenager has been out after midnight. This is a much more direct relation than murder. Plus, I can’t comment on murder laws, as I’ve never been a murderer, but I have consumed alcohol and I have been a teenager.
I would not broadly equate drinking a driving, a much more general case than the specific scenario I described, to breaking curfew, as that would encompass drinking anywhere from 1 sip of alcohol to an infinate amount.
The purpose of the curfew law is to lower the increased risk of injury to teenagers driving after midnight. Apparently statistics show they are more at risk, to themselves, *and to others *- such as the passangers they are driving, when driving after midnight, as already linked to in this thread. This is the same argument as for laws to prevent driving after consuming enough alcohol to impair driving ability. It would be interesting to have a side-by-side comparason of fatal accidents involving teenaged drivers and drunk drivers.
I can’t find statistics for drunk drivers. All accidents where any person involved tests positive for alcohol of any amount are included with any statistics I can find, which could mean the passenger, a pedestrian, or whoever, has been drinking, whether or not they are over the legal limit or contributed to the accident at all.
By the way, the definition of drinking and driving is not “makes you a danger not only to yourself but to others”. It is still legal to drive after drinking. It is only illegal when your BAL is over 0.08 or it can otherwise be proven that your driving ability is impared.
I don’t think they should be able to get licensed until they’re 18, but if we’re going to let children drive death machines, we can at least restrict them to driving during the day, as well as limiting their passenger loads. Driving is something that takes a few years to really become fully competent at. It’s a lot more than just the mechanics of operating the vehicle. Still learning drivers (and all 16 year olds are still learning) are not yet ready to go out dodging drunks on saturday nights. I’m in my 40’s, and I still don’t like to go out on the roads late on the weekends, much less do so with a car full of dumbass teenagers screaming my ear and blaring that shitty music they listen to.
Having just come off a defensive driving and skid control course, I can attest to the fact that for some people, years of experience doesn’t always do the trick, either.
I never fail to be amazed at how many people
This is to some small extent true. But let’s not make the mistake of generalizing the behavior of all members of a group from a few or even a plurality of that group.
In many rural areas, children learn to drive young. It is brought home to them the responsibility they undertake in operating a motor vehicle. An older, responsible teen may transport his date, his younger sister and her date, or a couple who are friends, to and from a school dance, the school being 15 miles away from his home and similar distances from his date’s and his friends’ homes. And any offense reported back to his parents means revocation of driving privileges.
There’s a distinction between that and city teens, who can use public transportation essentially all night, or suiburban teens whose families can provide transportation.
I have known 14-year-olds whose judgment, by and large, I would trust – and I’ve known 20-year-olds who should be sent for remedial courses in how to behave in society. There’s a ;arge spectrum involving where and how an adolescent is raised, degree of responsibility expected at what age, and the inherent character of the child-becoming-adult, that is difficult to encapsulize in short soundbites.
ABS is easy: “put foot down”. Now, cadence braking, that’s hard.
California has stringent restrictions on teen driving, which I’m all for. However the justification for them is the reduction of accidents caused by teens being out at night drinking, or teens being distracted from too many others in the car. It is not to make them a smaller target - in fact there are circumstances where teens can drive after midnight, say from a job. So I’d like to see what percent of the increase in accidents is from those caused by the teens as opposed to those where they were victims.
That the kid swerved to avoid the drunk seems to indicate that he was not distracted.
They were probably listening to Rock ‘n’ Roll music, too!
Or playing on their YouTubes.
I think they all listen to that rapping music now…if you can call it music. They were probably watching it on their blueberries.
I thought it was iBerries.
L.O.L. You guys are so unhip.
Maybe we can take lessons from that Brittany chick who types in pink over in GQ.
Actually, it appears the statistics you’re looking at are fatalities resulting from accidents in which alcohol impairment is a factor. Here you go: 2006 and 2005 (warning: PDF) statistics as provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration via the CDC.
For those who won’t/can’t view the PDFs, here’s the breakdown:
In 2006, all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico had by law created a
threshold making it illegal per se to drive with a BAC of .08 or higher. Of the 13,470
people who died in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes in 2006, 8,615 (64%) were
drivers with a BAC of .08 or higher. The remaining fatalities consisted of 4,030 (30%)
motor vehicle occupants and 825 (6%) nonoccupants.
In 2005, all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico had by law
created a threshold making it illegal per se to drive with a BAC of .08 g/dL or
higher. Of the 16,885 people who died in alcohol-related crashes in 2005, 14,539
(86%) were killed in crashes where at least one driver or nonoccupant had a BAC
of .08 g/dL or higher.* Of the 14,539 people killed in such crashes, 71 percent were
drivers or nonoccupants with BAC levels at or above .08 g/dL. The remaining
29 percent were drivers or nonoccupants with either no BAC or BAC below .08
g/dL, or were passengers.
Or listening on their Blacktooth headphones.
Although I don’t disagree with your premise that teens drivers are considerably more dangerous. This has got to be one of the most useless statistics I have ever seen. I know what you’re *trying *to say, that the risk of accident goes up with teenage passengers in the car driven by a teenager, but the way you say it sort of makes me go, “Well, gee, who else would they be riding with?”
Still, I can’t say this correlates at all to the fact that these teens were killed by an adult drunk driver. Plenty of adults are also killed by drunk drivers and it’s not inconceivable that an adult in the teen’s place would have also been unable to avoid the accident with the drunk. So, regardless of the fact that those teens were at higher risk by their own actions, their own actions were not what killed them. It only put them in harm’s way of a drunk driver whose actions kill indiscrimately.