It’s a crisp autumn evening, the roads glistening with the first rains of the season. As you grip the steering wheel, your heart pounding, you see the flashing lights ahead, the wreckage of a car accident unfolding before your eyes. In that moment, you realize the fragility of life. You realize the acute impact our decisions behind the wheel can have on ourselves and others. You realize the colossal importance of driving safety. In 2022, a total of 42,795 people passed away as a result of a fatal car crash in the US. This means that over 117 people died every day from being involved in fatal accidents. That’s 117 mothers and fathers who get their hearts shattered. 117 sisters and brothers left feeling alone and lost. Driving fatalities don’t just affect the victims. The anguish of death is ever-spreading. So wouldn’t you agree that it’s tremendously important to create the best set of laws possible to minimize the amount of deaths in the US driving population? Contrary to popular belief, raising the minimum driving age does not address the root cause of the issue, which is that first-time drivers (regardless of age) have shown a considerable amount of driving qualities that stem from the lack of education in our country’s drivers. Pushing back or delaying driving fatalities to our older citizens cannot possibly be the best solution that a country as educated as the US can come up with. We need a permanent and effective solution to get the better of this issue truly.
Within this argument, many people lose track of the primary goal (decreasing driver deaths and making our roads as safe as possible) and get side-tracked on the age of these drivers. Specifically, teenagers and the elderly. While this is very important to pay attention to, let’s get one thing straight: Age is not the issue that we are fighting here. We are fighting to minimize the amount of drivers that are killed every year due to car crashes, and the amount of families that have to deal with the harsh reality of the death of a loved one. No matter what age of driver you are, you’re always going to make mistakes while driving. There’s always gonna be a little slip-up, or a bit of foolish irresponsibility here and there. Many times I feel that we as a society have normalized cars so much that we forget we’re driving a half-ton chunk of metal at 70 mph. We have become desensitized to the danger of cars because we’re so used to them. We have to respect that, at any point in time, you could make a wrong move or decision and end up killing anyone on the road or in the car next to you. We’ve lost respect for these beasts of the road as they’ve become domesticated. With every person passively driving and forgetting to do the little things like signal, check mirrors, or turn on headlights, the more dangerous the road gets. Cars are unarguably one of the most practical modern inventions in the world today, but we have to recognize that they have the power to do just as much harm as they can good if we want our roads and highways to be a safer place.
Raising the minimum driving age above 16 has saved many 16- to 17-year-old drivers’ lives, there’s no doubt about that. But what about the 18- to 20-year-old drivers? Studies have shown that once the minimum driving age is raised, a good amount of those 16- to 17-year-old driver deaths are not altogether going away, but just shifting to our nation’s 18- to 20-year-old drivers. Delaying the death of our nation’s youth is not the answer. We need to find a way to lower the deaths of all drivers, young and old if we want to be progressive on this issue. Sure, we could just keep pushing back the minimum driving age. Just wait until these kids are older for them to die, but I don’t see how that helps us progress as a country in any way at all. Not to mention all of the perfectly safe drivers that are affected by our nation’s less-safe drivers. Some could argue that giving teen drivers the extra two years of guided experience with a parent is highly beneficial, but as a teenage driver myself, I have to give my most blunt response to those people: A large portion of today’s teenagers aren’t going to use those extra two years to study how to be a better driver. The reality is that most of these teenagers are still going to do the bare minimum to get their license no matter what age you restrict their license to. Therefore, let us instead focus on what constitutes the “bare minimum”.
By shifting our definition of what makes a driver worthy of being on US roads and fighting to make license laws more restrictive for all ages we can save hundreds of thousands of lives over the next few years. We can do this by requiring more tests and classroom learning, increasing the number of driving hours needed, and making driving tests more rigorous before allowing someone to obtain a driver's license. We could even potentially enter talks of driver re-education as punishment for unsafe/neglectful driving. This will make the process of acquiring a license more rigorous, which will ultimately cut down on inexperienced drivers on the road and could play a large part in helping the millions of people who drive every day understand just how dangerous their vehicle has the potential to be. Driving is incredibly useful, but it can also be incredibly dangerous. If you cannot commit to being as safe a driver as you can possibly be, you should not be on the road. Having a driver's license and being able to use it freely is a massive privilege, and it should be treated as such, not as a fundamental right. This would provide a much more permanent solution as it could be continuously refined to best teach the future drivers of the US. In turn, we wouldn’t just be delaying the deaths of our nation’s teen drivers, but instead focusing on continually bettering the roads of our nation overall.