Teen Drivers: The New Kids on the Block

Driving has been a polarizing topic since the day motorized vehicles began populating roads.

“_____ don’t know how to drive!”

Any word describing anything from gender, state residency, to ethnicity, can fill the blank space in that sentence and there is bound to be someone has heard of it. Although before what you might’ve heard the most was that elderly people don’t know how to drive, teens are now literally the new kids on the block!

For many teenagers, driving is seen as the first step into true adulthood. You’re 16, you’re practically an adult! You can almost vote, and you’re almost a high school senior going into college, you can practically smell it! You should be able to do adult things such as drive a car!… err… right?

For a country like the United States of America where over 90% of households own at least one car, being able to drive has become more of a necessity than a luxury. Now more parents are begging their kids to get a driver’s license than kids begging to be taught to drive, contrary to previous years. Not only do more teens want to drive, but their parents also expect them to drive! So what’s the problem? There are many to choose from, from cell phones, to higher substance abuse issues in teens, to pure, unrefined teenaged-brain activity. But what might be the biggest undiscovered problem, is the lack of car safety. Usually, in test drives and safety programs, the dummies and regulations are made to resemble the likeliness of an average adult male driver. What happens when an average teenaged boy, maybe 30 to 50 pounds lighter or 4 to 6 inches smaller than an average adult man, gets into a car crash? The car that is not designed to be able to properly keep them safe and can become their casket. And when it happens to adult women, the chances of making a full recovery or staying alive in a car crash, decrease significantly. For teenaged, smaller framed, or elderly females? No matter where one is seated, it is not safe enough to be able to live through a car crash without extreme injury if you do not represent the average adult male in the United States of America.

The “She Drives Act” is a bill in Congress that has been reintroduced recently to attempt to rectify these dangers. While it is focused on women, it can very easily apply to teenagers that have smaller frames and can be more affected by things like car crashes. To make cars safer for women, means to make cars safer for everybody else as well. It has not yet passed, but to make it gain traction contacting your local representatives and senators and urging them to approve of the bill can help it pass through the legislative system.

Practically, the best way to help teenagers stay safe on the road is to highlight the dangers. In my town, when you drive down the road you can almost certainly find a cross memorializing a car death in every corner. I had never paid much attention to it, until one day when four boys in my school simply never returned to the classrooms. I didn’t personally know them, but I knew many that did. Friends were lost in their grief, four boys in a car that suddenly lost control and swerved off the road, where they crashed into a solar panel structure that started a fire and engulfed them in flames. This tragic story came only a few months after a graduating senior had never made it home after her graduation after a truck ran a red light and crashed into a car holding three people: a 17 year old coming home from her graduation, her boyfriend, and his sister. Now, the only people who remember that are their friends and family members that were directly impacted by those losses.

Driving is the most dangerous act we do everyday, and the majority of people behind the wheel don’t think of it as such. Being on the road is a team effort, where everyone depends on the people around them to be able to keep themselves and others safe. It is not only a teen safety issue, it’s a public health crisis. Are we really going to let people continue to get injured because of preventable measures, such as car safety regulations? There are many things that can be improved to help with the amount of loss we face due to vehicle accidents in both the industry or bureaucratic level as there is in a personal day to day basis. For teens, it is important to crack down on the habit of recklessness that is the main teenage trait. Because although driver education is just as important, what good is it to know every law or part of transportation if you are not going to follow it?

It is important to have family members talk to their teenagers to realize the power, and lack thereof, they possess behind the wheel and on the road. Having them surround themselves with other like minded people that understand the responsibility of having a drivers license. That in a split second, you could injure yourself at best and cause multiple deaths at worst. The difficult part about learning to drive and be on the road is that there is no other way to learn than to do it. The inexperience teenagers possess combined with misplaced confidence allows for greater probability of being in an accident even if completely unintentional. The way they see their parents or guardians drive is the way they will learn to drive even if it is not entirely legal at worst or just a bit lazy at best. Parents are the example that their children will forever follow and driving is not an exception to that rule. As adults, it is necessary to spend more time with teenagers in the car to offer a better perspective to what they have.

In normal teenage fashion, it may be something they reject at first or find embarrassing, but it is better to be embarrassed than it is to be dead.