Raising Driving Age
Driving safety in simple word is only a matter of skill. Whether the driver is young or adult, driving safety seems to have no relation to the age. Yet, increasing number of car accidents in the US has pulled out the common assumption that driving solely depends on individual skill when moving the wheels on road. The rising number of teen drivers significantly turns to be the first object to concern about. Aside from the idea of 16 year old drivers has been always accepted in most of US states, even 14 in South Dakota and 15 in Idaho, Montana, or Minnesota, the accidents increase killing a thousand of teenagers has taken a serious account of the entire nation’s entities on a need of raising driving age in the country. It comes to a question on how important to raise the driving age is in relation with the reduction of deadly accidents in the United States.
In 2000, 6,495 teen drivers aged 15 to 20 were killed in motor vehicle crashes as reported by The National Safety Council. From the whole licensed teenage drivers, 14.8 % were involved in fatal accidents. The number might be only representing 6.6% of the total licensed drivers in the US, the amount worth double victims of WTC bombing in 2001. Fatal injuries in this year reached more than 326,000 happening to young drivers. Still in 2000, 30% of the deadly crashes killing young drivers involved alcohol while fatal traffic crashes amounted over twice the rate of other age drivers in the country. This fact was what drove the council to call on warnings to parents upon their inexperienced kid drivers to avoid the recurrent fatal crashes of motor vehicles.
Entering 2002, Melih Ozatalay wrote that the deadly car accidents killed 3,827 teen drivers in the same age range. Quoting from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s report, the number of fatal crash causing the death of teen drivers in 2003 remained close to the previous year. It reached 3,657 drivers aged 15 to 20 years old. Meanwhile, 64 out of every 100,000 young drivers aged 16 years old were involved in a fatal accident in 2005 according to the report.
Given the evidence, raising driving age turns to be the notion by which a number of fatal crash accident killing your drivers could be reduced, if not to say eliminated at all. There are three reasons at least underlying the urgency of this preposition; first, lack of driving experience along with the absence of comprehensive training, second, teenager’s immaturity in their driving behavior, third, the externality impacts of raised driving age.
We cannot deny that most of teenagers, if not to say all, are not yet experienced in driving. Individual sufficiency in driving skill cannot be simply measured by teenage adeptness in leading a car.
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