A while back I commented that young men are not excited about the prospect of driving, and was met with incredulity (I'm taking "What planet are you from?" as incredulity). In the article below, A Major Daily Newspaper Which Cannot Spell hazards its guess as to why this has come to pass. I was pleased to see a reference to a Mid-Sized City Near Me, which I contend (with a nod to Florida's "special issues") has the absolute worst drivers in the country. Also note the involvement of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the smiling spawn of satan.
I got a license at 16 "like everybody else," after a mandatory and mediocre school course which is no longer offered, with a couple of years of off-road (construction site) experience. My father was 14 in 1937, and signed a paper testifying that he already knew how to drive (he did). He's 84 now, a million-miler, and (tap wood) has never had a major accident. My son, 15 (And a half! Important here) has the permit, could pass tomorrow on a one-ton, is mildly frustrated by the clutch, and shows emphatic disinterest in our 6X6. I had him stop the Cherokee on a back road the other day to get the feel of doing burnouts, and he asked why you'd want to do that. I'm perplexed.
My question is: at what age and under what circumstances did NG'ers get a driving license, and did you find your preparation was adequate for the real world?
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Safety Fears, Insurance Costs, New Laws Push Back Age When Teens Start to Drive Wall Street Journal April 27, 2006; Page D1
Racing out to get your driver's license has long been a rite of passage upon turning 16.
Not so in Julie Malkin's household. Although her state allows licensing as early as age 16, the Toledo, Ohio, mother says her teenage daughter "was in no way ready at that age for the responsibility of driving." She required her to wait until she was 17.
Ms. Malkin may reflect a national trend. The proportion of 16-year-olds who hold licenses has dropped four percentage points since 2001 to 30%, part of a 10-year decline totaling more than 12 points since the mid-1990s, Federal Highway Administration data show.
The trend is driven largely by a move among states toward graduated driver's licensing. Rather than giving new drivers unrestricted licenses, 45 states now impose three-stage requirements, including an intermediate stage after the learner's permit, before a full license is granted, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an Arlington, Va., nonprofit. That means it generally takes teens longer to complete the process.
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Sue Shellenbarger discusses reader email.However, growing parental protectiveness also is playing a role, experts say. While the bulk of states' graduated-licensing laws were passed in the mid- to late 1990s, the
16-year-old driver rates have continued a steady decline since then, driven at least partly by family factors."Parents are being more protective," says Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, a Washington nonprofit. "A lot of parents are scared" by both the hazards and the high insurance premiums associated with driving at 16.
The trend poses challenges for parents, not the least of which is dealing with sullen 16-year-olds who are chafing to drive. But it promises to reduce high teen car-crash rates and ease parents' worry and costs.
"People drive like idiots," Ms. Malkin says, citing an incident on I-80 near her home. She says her daughter, driving on a learner's permit, was forced onto a berm on the shoulder of a highway by a speeding truck that didn't let her merge onto the road. Her daughter was frightened of driving too, she says. "So many kids we knew had been in accidents. It was a regular occurrence to see cars in the ditch, to hear in school that 'so-and-so got in an accident.' "
Motor-vehicle crashes are still the leading cause of death among 16- to
20-year-olds, accounting for more than twice as many fatalities as the next-highest cause, homicide, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says. But the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says the reduced licensing rate among the youngest potential drivers has cut the rate of fatal accidents in the 16-year-old population as a whole. Fatal car crashes among all 16-year-olds, drivers and nondrivers, have declined by 26% since 1993, the institute says.Adding a 16-year-old to your auto insurance boosts premiums sharply. In an example provided by State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance, Bloomington, Ill., the annual premium on an average policy for an Indianapolis father with a 2002 Honda Civic would more than double, to $1,370 a year from $628, if he added his 16-year-old daughter as an occasional driver. If she were the primary driver, the annual premium would soar to $1,706. Drivers' training courses, too, now cost several hundred dollars per student, far more than in the past, when high schools routinely offered it as part of the curriculum.
More parents are treating driving as a parenting tool rather than an entitlement. Maggi Pratt, owner of a State Farm Insurance agency in Bloomington, Ill., says she sees a significant increase in parents raising the bar, "requiring their kids to get good grades in school, and also to help out financially" with car insurance, she says. Greg Golden, who manages an import-export business in Los Angeles, is already telling his 12-year-old son that driving will hinge not on turning 16, but on his behavior and school performance.
Changing family lifestyles come into play, too. Some kids are too busy to run the increasingly complex licensing gantlet set up by many states. Steve Boggs, Gaffney, S.C., says his daughter, now 19, still hasn't found the time to meet the requirements to transition from a six-month learner's permit to an intermediate license. She has played tennis competitively, which takes up a lot of her time. And during the past three summers, she has been in Canada or Europe studying foreign languages. "Kids nowadays have much less time than I did at that age," Mr. Boggs says.
Also, some of today's involved parents don't mind driving their teenagers around. One factor that has Mary Glenn, Colleyville, Texas, delaying her son from starting the learner's permit process at 15 is that he would lose time with his dad, who shuttles him to school every day. "If you didn't drive them around, think of how much you lose" in time spent interacting, she says.
Although many parents believe it's necessary to police kids' driving more closely, it bears burdens. Tony Clement, president of a San Jose, Calif., construction-supply company, revoked his 17-year-old son's license after a series of minor infractions, telling him he'd get it back after he graduates. But while Mr. Clement knows his decision was wise, dealing with his son's disappointment has been hard. "I'm probably more miserable than he is."
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