Increase The Car Driving Age To 18
Reasons for:
- Public safety
- Decrease in car driving, pollution, congestion
- Increase public transport use
- Lower road toll of young inexperienced drink drivers
- Increase cycle use (good for health)
Reasons against:
- Lack of public transport options
- reduced revenue from petrol/car/road taxes
page revision: 1, last edited: 13 Feb 2009 04:00
"# Lower road toll of young inexperienced drink drivers"
Theres a good argument that it could just delay it, with driver inexperience starting at 18, rather than 15
I honestly wouldn't want to see this without the drinking age being further lowered. I think one needs to come before the other- and preferably with comprehensive attempts to curb binge drinking among teens.
So how about capping the number of driving licenses at the current level (around 3 million I guess) and only issuing new licenses to replace those where drivers have died or given up their license?
Then make the driving test a competitive exam (similar to Cambridge exams, which a lot of people are keen on). If 50,000 licenses are available, only the 50,000 drivers scoring highest on their test would get licenses.
It'd achieve all the goals above.
A brainstorm idea: Complement the drivers' licence system with a drinking licence. You would need to choose which one you want to hold (or are able to hold) - this would apply to all age groups. You then either are allowed to drive or to drink, but drink driving and drive drinking would result in losing the right to hold any licence for a period of time. Swapping would be possible, say, every 48 hours.
To qualify for a drinking licence, you would need to prove you can "hold your ale", e.g. being sick in a taxi results in losing your drinking licence.
And driver's licences should be re-sat every 7 years or so.