Here's a position that won't make me popular with fellow Americans aged 14 to 17, but that thin demographic slice isn't well-known for reading newspapers, so I'll take a chance:
Several members of Congress are sponsoring bills that would set a minimum unrestricted driving age for the entire nation at age 18 and make compliance with the requirement a condition for receipt of federal highway funds.
At present, driving requirements are established by the individual states, as described by John Estus of The Oklahoman in an article distributed recently by Scripps Howard News Service. The result is a patchwork of laws and arrangements. In most states, 16-year-olds who have driven for six months without a citation can drive unsupervised until 10 p.m. After another six months or so they can drive without restrictions.
But some states issue learner's permits or allow unsupervised driving for teenagers as young as 14.
The Safe Teen and Novice Driver Uniform Protection Act would provide for a three-stage process that begins with a learner's permit at age 16 and leads up to full licensure at 18. This would be a good law.
Opponents will argue that some 16-year-old drivers are more competent than others at, say, age 30. Perhaps, but law can't easily deal with those kinds of distinctions. The fact is, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 16-year-old drivers have more accidents per highway mile than any other age group. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported recently that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for American teenagers, accounting for about a third of all deaths in that age group.
Nudging the legal driving age upwards a bit, that is, in the direction of more maturity, experience and responsibility, would at least have the practical effect of reducing the number of 16-year-olds who are killed each year in auto accidents.
Better highways, seat belt laws and safer cars have resulted in safer automobile travel in our country, both in terms of total fatalities and in terms of deaths per highway mile. Nevertheless, more than 37,000 people were killed on our highways in 2008 — more than a hundred people every day.
Somehow that still seems like a lot. It took our three worst years in Vietnam put together to reach the level of death that we accept almost without notice every year on our highways.
Would raising the legal driving age to a national standard solve all of our highway safety problems? Certainly not. But it might serve as a message to young drivers, that handling several thousand pounds of automobile at highway speeds is serious business calling for a mature sense of social responsibility.
In general, that's not the message they're getting now. Americans are inveterate speeders in spite of the significant obvious connection between excessive speed and accidents. They are runners of red lights and they drink too much while driving. Lately, they've been yakking on cell phones and texting behind the wheel.
This display of irresponsibility isn't lost on young would-be drivers. In fact, in light of the way we drive, imposing a higher legal driving age on them might ring a bit hollow, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do gesture. But at the least it's a gesture that will save the lives of a significant number of 16-year-olds.
Is the legal driving age the most important thing we could be thinking about right now? After all, since April 20 a runaway well has dumped between 22 million and 47 million gallons of crude oil into the comparatively clean waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
On the other hand, during that same period more than 4,000 Americans were killed in automobile accidents. Someday, presumably, the oil well will be capped. Raising the legal driving age seems like a small enough effort to make to help stem another relentless drain on another valuable resource.
John M. Crisp teaches in the English department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail him at jcrisp@delmar.edu.