Teen Driving

Think of getting into the car with your parent, to see a friend of sibling, when you're turning down Lake Stevens road when all of the sudden… Crash! Some poor random sixteen year old ployed right into your car. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the expensive family car was totaled. This does happen everyday in real life, and sometimes people get hurt or even die. Adolescent drivers sometimes do extremely reckless things that cause them to end up in a crash resulting in a possible injury. Young people often think that they don’t need to wear seatbelts and when driving other teenage passengers are easily distracted. It is time to up the legal driving age to eighteen and save lives.

It is true that most teenagers look forward to turning sixteen and getting a driver license. Many parents are also able to use the possibility of getting a car as a motivational tool. However studies show that many teenagers are just skilled enough at sixteen to be driving. Keeping teens off the road for a couple additional years would greatly impact humanity and decrease the death count for young drivers. For example according to a recent study done In 2014, 3,885 fifteen to eighteen year olds were involved in life threatening car crashes (Teen Drivers, Insurance Information Institute). This study clearly shows that many adolescent drivers were not ready for this responsibility. Another study says this about teenage drivers, “Teens are more likely than older drivers to underestimate dangerous situations or not be able to recognize hazardous situations. Teens are also more likely than adults to make critical decision errors that lead to serious crashes” (Teen Drivers: Get the Facts, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

Although some may believe that these statistics aren’t that big considering the amount of people in the world, compared to the rates of the other age groups it is a very big problem. Teenagers are one point six times more probable to be in a life threatening accident than middle aged adults(Teen Drivers, Insurance Information Institute), Taking in consideration that the teen age group is significantly smaller than the middle age group, this is a major concern. Contrasting to middle aged folks, people in their 20’s have a grand rate of three times less likely than teens to crash (Teenagers, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). Meaning, teens crash three times more than people in their 20’s also proving that if we make the legal driving age eighteen or change the permit laws we could lower those rates.

Pennsylvania leads the country’s driving permit laws with having a minimum permit age of sixteen and at least 65 hours of supervised driving hours. (Graduated driver licensing Introduction, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). Even having some of the stricter