Driving Age

How young is too young to drive ? It is a major in America today Many feel that sixteen , the general licensing age , is too young to operate a vehicle . Should a law be passed which changes the legal driving age from sixteen to nineteen ? Granted , learning to drive is a teenage right of passage but teens are statistically the worst drivers in the public domain . Therefore , I support changing the legal driving age for the above reason as well as the following three reasons : it will prevent teen deaths , decrease parental stress and

save parents money

First of all , protecting human life should be important to everyone The Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD ) website attributes 6 ,000 of the 42 ,000 annual vehicular deaths to teens . My best friend 's brother died two weeks before his seventeenth birthday because he accepted a ride with a friend who was not sure how to proceed through an intersection Larry Musselman , director of the teen-driving institute at Safe America Foundation , believes accidents like the one involving my friend 's brother happen because the decision-making part of the brain does not mature until the late teens and early twenties . If drivers were forced to wait until eighteen for licensure they would make better decisions on the road

Granted , some teens mature before others , but , that does no mean their parents stop worrying about them . Take for instance the March 28 , 2006 Daily Herald Article entitled Lead Foot Puts Teen in Deep Doo-Doo which covered the trial of a seventeen year old girl ticketed twice for speeding two months in a row . The judge , also a parent , asked the girl if she considered that her mother prays she will come home in one piece every time the girl drives somewhere . This same concern is why my aunt Debra prefers to drive my cousins to many of the places they need to go especially , during rush-hour . As study by A F Williams shows that the crash rate for sixteen year olds is 241 per 10 ,000 within the first month of licensure and only drops to 107 per 10 ,000 after 9 to 10 months . Changing the legal driving age will effectively confront parental concerns about their teens driving before they are mature enough

Finally , parents worried about the safety of their teens must also consider how much it costs to have a teenage driver in the household . My uncle Mike refused to buy his daughters a car until they got jobs and could pay either their car payments or insurance . To be sure , car insurance is expensive for the parents of teens because driver risk pros (which decide cost ) consider the frequency and likelihood of accidents . According to the Christian Science Monitor , 3 out of very 10 sixteen year old drivers will be in a serious crash . Phil Berardelli , a highway safety advocate , urges parents to consider the costs involved in repairing a car that a sixteen year old will very likely wreck . If...