Yeah, it is pointless, except for learning how to be responsible for your own schedule and earn your own way by working for it yourself.

Completely pointless…

PerfectZero: I find it hard to believe that more rigorous driver education and requirements would have that effect, but I would be interested to read a published study saying otherwise.

The research indicates that increased access to driver training increases the number of young drivers who are able to get a license. (The availability of driver training increases the number of young people who qualify to get a license and increases their passing rates.) The belief isn’t that the driver training causes the accidents, but that the increased number of licensed drivers in that age group adds to the number of drivers who can get into accidents in the first place. The accident rate remains similar, but with more drivers on the road, you end up with a greater number of accidents.

Tomb Z: Kids need to take more responsibility earlier. It’s a bad idea to be so overly protective.

What is the price of their “need for responsibility” when it kills off thousands of other people, some of whom were presumably already responsible grown ups with spouses and families and kids of their own?

The question that we need to ask ourselves as a society is whether the death toll created by young people driven by hormones and peer pressure is acceptable or not. Obviously, we tolerate some casualty rate on our highways — a fatality rate of zero would be impossible to achieve — but there is some line that shouldn’t be crossed. Maybe we’ve drawn it in the wrong place.

rtz: My best driving memories are from when I was 16 and 17.

Some of mine are, too. And I, too, managed to get through my teen years with a beater, without recreating the fatal scene from Rebel Without a Cause. It’s just clear from the data that other kids aren’t quite so lucky, and they manage to take quite a few other people down with them.

True, kids won’t like this idea, but parents will like it even less. Most parents can hardly wait for the kids to start driving so they can finally hang up their chauffeur hat. In my case, I was expected to chauffeur a younger sibling, as well as an older relative who could no longer drive because of a medical condition.

Except for NYC, mass transit in the USA is a sad joke. Besides, how many parents would want their nubile young daughters on the bus with illegal aliens and winos?

Amen. When I went to elementary school in the late 70s, early 80s, kids walked or took the public bus (or the school bus in my one year at a rural school). Now everyone is so damn afraid of the bogeyman that there is a traffic jam in front of every elementary school in the city at 8:45 and 3:00 every day.

I generally like our graduated licensing system in BC. You can get still get a learner’s permit at 16, but for a minimum of one year you need to drive with a supervisor, and with substantial restrictions. After a year, you can take a road test and enter the “novice” phase where you no longer need a supervisor, but you can’t drive with more than one passenger (two if one is a 25+year old supervisor) and a couple other restrictions (e.g. zero blood alcohol tolerance). The novice period is a minimum of 24 months, but you can reduce it by six months by taking a recognized driver training course. (We don’t have any kind of driver’s ed in high school in Canada – that is uniquely American I think). This licensing scheme applies to all new drivers, regardless of age.

But as rtz said, many of my best car-related experiences were as a 16-18 year old. Unfortunately, too many of them were near-brushes with death! Of course, driving a clapped-out, 15 year-old Chevelle with a 350, purchased for $450 will yield a few such experiences! (Who says having a car needs to be expensive? I had that car for three years, put nothing but gas in it – ok, lots of gas – and sold it for $300.)

{Aside – please make the comment entry box bigger. It is so hard to keep your thoughts coherent when you can only see five lines of text.}

At my high school there were maybe 8-10 parking spaces available for students. This was a school with over 1200 kids in it. You walked or took the bus to school. Nobody drove their kids, and even with a car I rarely drove myself.

1. We’ve come to understand that the teen brain isn’t really ready for a lot of responsbility earlier.

2. In my experience, most kids who get a job to get a car find their paycheck consumed by the car. While the work experience is probably somewhat valuable, overall it seems like a pointless exercise.

However, our lifestyle works against us. There’s damned little public transportation to pick up the slack. Parents DO employ their children as chauffeurs (how smart is that?) and by the time the kid is age 16, they consider it a bonus that he can at least drive himself. Sprawl dicates that we go nowhere without wheels.

As regards the situation at the school, the transportation department staffs as though the kids don’t drive themselves; otherwise the bus routes would take forever (they’re long as it is).

As regards the “nanny state” not letting the “young’uns” do what we did, at my high school cars were the exception, not the rule. If we take the kids cars away, they’ll be doing exactly what I did as a kid, taking the bus, riding a bicycle and working on improvising transportation where those don’t satisfy.

And it’s not the nanny state coddling the kids, it’s the parents. Over half the local elementary school arrives by car because Suzie Suburb won’t risk her child’s life on a perfectly safe bus (but, as noted, she will later employ her 16-year old as a chauffeur; this is one of the reasons for monster SUVs).

Children that could *walk* arrive by car.

Biking to the mall is out of the question.

Around here, they don’t even get unstructured play; the afternoons are arranged. When I was a kid, you were allowed in the house for 10 minutes after school to eat a snack and, unless the tornado sirens were wailing, you were expected to go outside and play. You can’t learn to settle your own disputes if there’s always a coach around (to confer favor on his own kid and a few select others) taking the matter out of your hands.

I agree that behavioral issues are the root of the problem, but believe me those tendencies are still there when you’re 18. I know because I’m not that much older. Unless you’re going to raise the age to 25, which would be impossible, you’re just sending kids into the world with less experience and the same behavior.

In fact, lower the age, but with horsepower, passenger and time-of-day provisos.

I learned to “drive” at 12, on a Farmall tractor. At 14, I graduated (illegally) to my friend Billy Zeitlin’s ‘48 Jeep, and I vividly remember inadvertently passing my mother on a back road in it one afternoon. She took me straight to the New York State Police, turned me in, they yelled at me a lot (I assume that was the deal my mother struck), and I slowly worked my way up the car chain until by damn I owned my very own 1936 Ford.

Worked for me, I’m still alive.

As for the effectiveness of driver training, my daughter’s was Skip Barber, her 18th birthday present (both the road-driving and competition courses). Her 16th-birthday present was a new twin-cam Neon Sport Coupe–the essence of spoil-your-daughter excessiveness, right?

Wrong. I told her she was welcome to date the guy with the Camaro, date the guy with the Mustang, but she was driving, they were riding. In her Neon, like it or not. Worked for her.

By that logic my parents would still be driving me to school and work. That would be awesome.

/sarcasm

Also, I don’t know how I would have made it to class everyday if I didn’t have a car at 16. Hell, my parents had to drive me to my classes for the first year of college….

The bulk of the research indicates that the opposite is true. Driver education training does not reduce crash rates, and actually increases the number of crashes by allowing a higher proportion of teens to obtain driver licenses.

The problem isn’t with a lack of technical ability, and it certainly isn’t with an absence of motor skills, the one area in which young people tend to excel as compared to the overall driving pool. As just one example, Johns Hopkins prepared a study in 1995 entitled “Understanding Youthful Risk Taking and Driving” which specifically studied this issue and found the problem to be one of behavior, not education:

Youth, especially males, are substantially overrepresented in motor vehicle crashes and fatalities. Experiential, developmental, psychosocial, and personality factors all likely contribute. Novice drivers quickly attain proficiency in such skills as steering and braking. Over a period of months, they learn to concentrate their visual fixations in the vehicle’s projected path, and to use peripheral vision to locate the vehicle in the lane. Lagging behind acquisition of motor skills is development of decisional skills. Studies show youth more likely to engage in riskier behaviors such as faster driving, tailgating, and refraining from safety belt use. Youth often overestimate their driving skills, and tend to perceive themselves as less vulnerable to a crash than their peers. They also may attach priority to social interaction within the vehicle to the detriment of the driving task at hand. Adding to potential risks for selected youth are intra-personal traits that some studies have associated with riskier driving or crashes, such as sensation seeking (heightened among teenagers) and behavior disorders.

The experience needed to point the car down the road, keep it going straight, and stop it is acquired fairly quickly. What takes longer is the rational thought process needed to make wise decisions, as opposed to the exciting or fun ones that they tend to be more inclined to make.

The idea that a 2 year maturity difference is really going to matter is ridiculuous. The real problem is the lack of serious driver education. Anything else is just an attempt to sidestep the issue.

The US does not have the public transportation infrastructure to support that.

“The number one key rule in all nanny state legislation is to make sure the young’uns of today can’t do what we all did when we was young. No you can’t drive, you can’t drink, wear your seatbelt, wear a bicycle helmet, don’t go wandering around at night, no fireworks, etc. etc. etc. How in the hell did anyone live past the age of 20 back then? WE SHOULD ALL BE DEAD!”

Well, some are dead. My dad used to coach little league and he’d pile 15 or so kids in the back of his pickup and off we’d go to the ballgame. We didn’t have an accident, but some other people driving kids in the bed did have accidents and the kids died. That’s why they don’t let you ride in the bed anymore.

Seatbelts and bike helmets are good ideas. They save lives and brains. Can’t see anyone being upset by that. Fireworks are for retards – ask my neighbor who’s garage burned down because of the neighbor kids playing with fireworks

I don’t mind a bit of sensible legislation.

I was shocked that for her on-the-road driving test the instructor didn’t take her on the highway at all. A little bit of low speed motoring around town and she was considered good to go. Since we are providing the car (an old Volvo 240) and the insurance we have made it clear that even though the state thinks she is ready to go anywhere, anytime that isn’t the way it works in our home. Bit by bit she is getting a larger operating zone and time window as she demonstrates the experience and temperament to handle it.

The existing state of affairs with driver training and certification in the US is a bad joke and a lot of people are dying because of it. I wish we had a system more like Germany’s where it is very hard and expensive to get a license. A system modeled after what it takes to get a private airplane pilot’s license would be great!

To those who say just throw the kids into the driving pool, no thanks. They aren’t only putting their kids at risk, but more importantly everyone else with whom the roads are shared!

Problem is that a very high percentage of people use schemes to not have their kids on their policies and externalize ownership of some POS car because the rates for kids are very high. It takes an army of lawyers to collect damages and the parents of the dumbest kids usually have no assets.

I would have rather been exposed to a lot more driving, more intensive and challenging classroom, and been certified to drive with restrictions – only cars under a certain weight, or low horsepower, or able to stop from 20/40/60 within a certain distance (which would tested in the yearly SAFETY inspection). Want to drive an SUV? Get an SUV license. Want to drive a fast car? Yep, another license. Want to drive a motorcycle? Oh, we already have that. How about a big rig? Yep, that’s already covered too. Have the driver place their license on their windshield as they’re driving (like a Tolltag), and scan it like they do with radar. Ticket people and revoke licenses as a rule when people put others’ lives in danger.

None of this will happen. As our consumer society and market economy dictates, safety on the roads takes a back seat to consumer desires and the car manufacturer’s ability to play to those desires. There is no way in the USA that we’d legislate ANYTHING that would prevent the automakers from selling vehicles, and making licenses harder to get would do that. Raising the driving age would do it as well. So, since we all want to believe we’re free to do as we please, safety must take a back seat to capitalism. And the 16 year olds must remain uneducated. After all, their inexperience creates more demand for cars after they total their first (and second, and third) vehicles.

I have been driving on road since I way 12 and I taught my daughter to drive at 13…On a 5-speed stick…In Paris. It only took about an hour for her to stop making a nuisance of herself to other drivers. I am a big believer in the Throw-kids-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool education method. It forces them grow-up, think for themselves, and become responsible.

For much of the country bicycles do not work just fine.

I just love this line of thinking. Truth is, a lot more people DID die back then, on a per capita and (where applicable) per miles traveled basis. But the vast majority lived. Could we do better? Sure, and we did.

If driving were so inherently dangerous that some critical mass of people did die, it would be banned entirely. Look at what happened to dirigibles after the Hindenburg incident.