Congress’s lack of attention toward raising the driving age is shocking despite the high prominence of teenage crash rates in today’s driving culture.
While there are many responsibilities associated with turning sixteen years old, driving, of all things, should not be one of them. For many American teenagers, reaching the driving age is the hallmark of maturity and the official passage into young adult life. One aspect often overlooked by parents and Congress alike, however, is the overconfidence in teenager’s cognitive development at the ripe age of sixteen.
The argument against raising the driving age comes from a question of practicality. With many teenagers working part-time jobs and entering the workforce, it is impractical for working parents to provide transportation to their children’s jobs. However, this is an ineffective objection when compared to the safety of America’s youth.
It is a well-established fact that the frontal lobes of adolescents do not fully develop until around their mid-twenties. A fully developed adult frontal lobe equips a driver with strong decision-making and risk-assessing abilities – two qualities, among others, which are imminently crucial when operating a motor vehicle.
According to the National Institute of Health, “The capacity for planning, logical reasoning, and understanding the long-term consequences of behavior are far from fully developed during the period when most young people in America are beginning to drive.”
The evidence for increased risk of young teenagers operating a motor vehicle does not end with brain research, however. Driver performance research conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety supports the notion that waiting two years to get a license makes a significant difference. Waiting two more years to get a license may be a matter of life or death for many 16 and 17-year-olds, quite literally.
“The youngest drivers continue to have by far the greatest driving risk,” Tefft said. “The crash rate of drivers ages 16-17 years was nearly double that of drivers ages 18-19”.
The first attempt to raise the driving age was with The Safe Teen and Novice Driver Uniform Protection Act (STANDUP Act), a bill proposed in 2011 by members of congress. This billwould award incentivized grants to states that raised the minimum age required to obtain a permit to 16 and the minimum age to obtain a driver’s license to 18. In addition, the bill would prohibit nighttime driving until the age of twenty-one.
Since then, no further efforts have been made by Congress to address this issue. Although the implications of this bill give power to the states to decide whether to implement these regulations, a national minimum driving age would put American teenagers in safer hands.
