Keeping Driving Age at or Above 16 Years Old

Perhaps it is unfair to label all younger drivers as reckless and dangerous. At the very least, they are most certainly less experienced and adept at driving, on average. Since a firm and enforced age is the best way to regulate who can drive for the first time, that is the method that should remain. On average, teen drivers are restricted or banned from driving for several reasons. Those reasons include insufficient brain development, lack of responsibility and a propensity to not pay proper attention. While typecasting people based on age is not always fair, there are reasons behind the age restriction.

The first main point to consider when it comes to why children under sixteen should not be driving, at least in an unrestricted way, is insufficient brain development. The ideas and theories about the broader subject development do vary. However, there are some things that tend to be agreed up on a lot of the time. One of those would be that a good majority of brain development occurs in the very early years of life and in the womb. However, the process surely does not stop at that point. Indeed, it continues for several decades afterward. The brain is still going through a lot of changes and shifts in the teens, twenties and perhaps the thirties, depending on who is offering the ideas or scholarly opinions. However, the part of the theory that is clearly geared towards the topic of this report is the fact that the brains of teens that are entering the driving age realm are clearly still developing. One part of the brain that is still developing at the age of 16 would be the frontal lobe. This is part of the brain that is essential for driving. This confluence of factual information clearly indicates that children at the age of 16 that are driving should be tightly regulated and surveilled. So long as there are no incidents or red flags, the children in that bracket can drive. However, there will be instances where bad choices and brain development patterns (if not both) will impact the driving habits of the teens involved. As such, proper command and control over such drivers is vital. To use a short phrase that was employed by NPR when it came to teen brain development, the teen brain is “not just grown up yet (NPR, 2010). No less than a journal article from the National Institutes of Health repository weight in and said that there are “characteristics of adolescence” that can absolutely affect driving. Obviously, people develop and grow at different rates. This is due to both environmental and genetic factors. This will not be a negative influence for all teen drivers. However, that can absolutely be the case (National Institutes of Health, 2007)

The debate about teen driving as it relates to brain development is very much a matter of theory and conjecture. The same cannot be said when it comes to teens and responsibility. Surely, there are many teens that act responsibly and properly, inclusive of when they drive. However, the odds of this being true in many to most instances is just not supported by fact. Even teens that mean well can end up in rather precarious situations due to lack of judgement. Much of this is due to lack of experience and driving in general. After all, there is only so much that can be simulated in an empty parking lot or a docile traffic situation. Doing the same or similar maneuvers in rush hour traffic or in busy areas in general is just not the same thing. However, many teens are simply not old or experienced enough to know that, they get flustered or they simply have not had enough practice in a controlled environment. For example, a teen driver in a smaller town is going to get a culture clash and a rude awakening if they drive in Dallas, New York or San Francisco. Even moderately sized cities like Indianapolis and Tulsa are hugely different than those metropolitan areas. There are also multiple driving “modes” or patterns including long-range drives of several hundred miles, driving on interstates versus driving on county or local roads, driving at city speeds versus driving at highway speeds, driving in dry weather versus driving in snow or rain and so forth. Whatever can be controlled and simulated is good. However, it is not commonly reasonable or possible to account for all of that. It is possible to mitigate this by being cautious and tepid. However, that itself can create issues in some driving scenarios. That being said, teens that are coached and prepared in the right way, even with the lack of experience, can lead to a halving of the risk of crashes or injury. However, that is not enough of a benefit to counteract the idea that most sixteen-year-olds are ill-prepared to drive well. As such, the legal driving age of 16 (or higher) is easily justifiable given what tends to happen entirely too often (TDS, 2017).

The third major reason that the teen driving age could and should be at sixteen or higher is because of lack of attention. A lot of this third topic relates to the second. Indeed, teens may be ill-informed and under-prepared when it comes to what they should pay attention to, how the objects of their attention should be judged and so forth. However, there are additional layers and issues that have to be considered as well. Indeed, teen drivers are often unaware of the implications of not paying attention to what is going on while driving. What tends to make things worse is that many teens are wont to be distracted by people in the car. Another distracting agent would be cell phones, using the radio or other car features (e.g. GPS) and so forth. Texting while driving in particular is extremely dangerous. However, another example of distracted driving mentioned earlier in this paragraph is even worse, and that would be distractions from passengers. When looking at young drivers from 16 to 19 years of age over a period of six years, it was found that mobile phone/tablet use, while an issue, was not the primary problem. Indeed, teen drivers being distracted from other people in the car was a much bigger problem. This was not some casual study that posted an anecdotal theory. This was based on seventy pages of analysis that used real and proven statistical analysis such as regression analysis and confidence scores. The overall list of things that distract teens the most would include texting, talking on a cell phone (including handsfree), using a mobile device to access the internet, watching videos or movies on entertainment devices, grooming (e.g. combing hair, putting on makeup, etc.), eating food, drinking drinks, partying within the vehicle and otherwise being rowdy and reading of any sort. The last of those would include reading textbooks, newspapers or even directions or emails. Passengers and how they influence or distract drivers, however, remains the top item because it would seem to be the reason for distracted driving roughly fifteen percent of the time. However, texting while driving was a close second, coming in at twelve percent. It should come as no surprise that teenagers have the highest crash rates when compared to other age groups. Across all age groups, distracted-driving crashes are ten percent of all crashes, eighteen percent of all injury crashes and sixteen percent of all police-reported crashes as of 2013. This is data that comes straight from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA (Araujo, 2017).