It is definitely not legal, but does happen very occasionally.
The issue is that 15 year olds are just that, 15 year old kids.
The issue is that 15 year olds are just that, 15 year old kids.
>Sixteen- to 19-year-olds represent 3.9% of licensed drivers, but account for 8.6% of drivers in all crashes and 6.0% of drivers in fatal crashes.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr...
Especially since those are the least experienced drivers. I wonder how 18-21 drivers look in countries with a higher age.
Though one way to look at it is that a teen driver today is just as safe/dangerous as an average driver 20 years ago, much safer than an average driver 30 years ago, and over twice as safe as an average driver 40 years ago. At least as far as fatalities go.
They're also the only cohort that can't legally drink, which probably lowers their fatality rate somewhat.
You would have to look at number of all collisions, not just fatalities to get any idea if today’s teens are safer compared to teens in the past.
Yes, that's my point. When cars are vastly safer, maybe it's not so bad to let moderately worse drivers be on the road.
> You would have to look at number of all collisions, not just fatalities to get any idea if today’s teens are safer compared to teens in the past.
Depends on what kind of safety you're worried about. Also I couldn't find any raw collision statistics.
Tell that to the pedestrians, cyclists and motorcycle drivers and see what they will say.
Andrew Gounardes, a NYS senator, attempted to push through a bill that would require additional ‘pedestrian safety’ ratings be posted for vehicles for sale in the state[1]. But otherwise, I don’t know any other state that has any safety ratings for people outside of the vehicles in the US
[0] https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Ped%20Spotl...
What I'm getting at is that while we should improve car vs pedestrian design, I don't think pedestrians are a reason to say teens shouldn't drive.
Feel free to cite some sources and specify what you mean by a small fraction... The United states is large and I can point to several areas where pedestrian and cyclist injuries and fatalities are not a small fraction. They tend to be where people are allowed to walk and bike and not just areas where it's only legal or feasible to drive.
> The average crash kills more occupants than pedestrians
In the United States, that is by design. Besides a handful of primarily coastal cities, you cannot legally or feasibly bike or walk in many places.
> I don't think pedestrians are a reason to say teens shouldn't drive.
I can't find anywhere in this thread that anyone was making a claim that teens shouldn't be able to drive. I believe people were saying we shouldn't allow people who are, statistically speaking, the least capable of driving safely to drive just because they'll be safer if they crash. We shouldn't lower our already extremely low bar for driving standards just because cars are getting bigger and occupants are more likely to survive when they run into a person or a tree.
I'd be perfectly fine with a driving age of 16, as long as the license was limited to vehicles that were under a specific size/weight and our driving standards and tests were greatly improved... With states like Georgia moving ahead with allowing anyone to get a license only with parental approval[0], I have no faith in things getting any better.
[0] https://www.complex.com/life/2020/04/georgia-drops-driving-t...
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Ped%20Spotl...
I cite this source and it says 17%
> I can't find anywhere in this thread that anyone was making a claim that teens shouldn't be able to drive.
To be clear I meant "under 18" there when I said "teens", because that's the group for which the law differs by country. "teenage minors" is normally what that word means to me.
So specifically, the chain of conversation went like this:
"The issue is that 15 year olds are just that, 15 year old kids. "
"How come 16 year old kids can drive just fine in the US?"
I very much read that as talking about whether teens are a hazard and should be able to drive, deliberately making a comparison to 18+ rules in Sweden.
"They can't. [...] Sixteen- to 19-year-olds represent 3.9% of licensed drivers, but account for 8.6% of drivers in all crashes and 6.0% of drivers in fatal crashes."
That continues the same comparison. Then I argued that the total rate of fatalities has been dropping tremendously, so teens these days are less of a hazard than non-teens in decades past.
> I believe people were saying we shouldn't allow people who are, statistically speaking, the least capable of driving safely to drive just because they'll be safer if they crash.
Do you mean Aeolun's comment? It's definitely not what I meant and nobody replied to that comment. So I don't think that's what the conversation was about.
> We shouldn't lower our already extremely low bar for driving standards just because cars are getting bigger and occupants are more likely to survive when they run into a person or a tree.
I'm not sure which age bar you're talking about, but honestly it depends on what you're trying to optimize for. And it's not just occupants surviving more. People in other cars survive more, and if you look back at the same years pedestrians survive more too! In the last few years the pedestrian fraction of vehicle deaths has been 16-17% of 1.15 deaths per hundred million miles, and in the late 70s it was 16-17% of 3.3 deaths per hundred million miles. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
The improvement is less if you go per capita instead of per 100 million miles, but it's still a big improvement.
And yes I'm aware that pedestrian deaths hit a low point and have been rising in the last few years, which is a real problem, but they're still significantly lower than they used to be.
Back in the day when costs were lower it was much more common to reconcile things without involving third parties and the legal requirements for max damage in low speed collisions were much more stringent.
It's driven (no pun intended) by a culture around cars and driving being a right, without consideration for whether everyone should.
Like a small city in Calfornia vs. Barcelona was a world of difference. The US has lots of wide, straight roads instead of the nightmare of one-way streets, bus lanes, bike lanes, mopeds and motorcycles etc. in Europe.
The challenges are different, but the probability of a fatal collision is higher in the US, whether per person or per vehicle, than in most EU countries. This doesn't surprise me, and it's not just due to driver training.
Navigating small streets built before cars is very likely to lead to broken side mirrors and scratched paint, but not injury or death. Misusing a bus lane gets you angry honking and gesturing from bus drivers and maybe a ticket from the police, but not injured or killed. A low-speed car-on-moped collision is bad of course, but not as bad as a car on one of those wide, straight American roads running a red light at 60 MPH and crashing into your driver's door at a right angle.
Here's a study with evidence that very wide lanes result in people driving faster and crashing more frequently, a particularly bad combination for safety.
https://www.academia.edu/12488747/Narrower_Lanes_Safer_Stree...