Should The Driving Age Be Raised To 18?

By Eric Peters, Automotive Columnist

Is 16 too young to drive?

If you’re 16. you probably think not. But it’s those over 16 — adults like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Adrian Lund — who will get to be the deeeeciders on this one. Lund and some others want to push the age at which a person can get their first driver’s license to 17 or even 18.

Of course, it’s all about “safety.”

Lund — a professional nag who heads an organization of nags — says that teenage drivers are a menace to themselves and others and wants to use the billy stick of the federal government (via withheld highway funds) to compel states to raise their legal driving age — just as the billy stick of federal money was used to impose the 55 mph speed limit, virtual Prohibition of alcohol and “primary enforcement” seat belt laws.

This time, it’s not merely “for the children” — it actually involves them.

And Lund is partially right. Teenagers do get into more than their fair share of wrecks. But is this due to their age — or their lack of training/experience?

There are some very young pro drivers — from NHRA to NASCAR. Maybe not sixteen-year-olds, but not far removed. At 15 or 16, some of these kids are better drivers than most of us will ever be. What to make of this fact?

Granted, these are exceptional kids — but the point’s not invalid: Experience and training probably mean a whole lot more than age — as such.

Will raising the age to 17 or 18 give a kid more experience — or less? Maybe the age at which we begin to train kids to drive should be lowered, not raised. Does it make more — or less — sense to toss a kid with zero hours behind the wheel a set of car keys at 17 or 18, when he is inches way from being legally free of any parental oversight whatsoever?

Maybe it would make more sense to begin teaching kids how to drive around 14 or 15 — easing them into it gradually, and with supervision — so that by the time they are 17 or 18 they have three or four years of experience behind them. That’s actually the way it used to be done, until public institutions such as public schools took over from parents and the whole process became bureaucratized and officialized — but with less than stellar results.

Driving is, after all, a skill like any other; it is not mastered overnight — or after a few weeks of classroom instruction and a couple of hours in the seat.

Logic says start them sooner, not later.

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Brand New Speed Trap Exchange Website Launched!

  
After a lengthy development process, we’ve launched our completely redesigned Speed Trap Exchange Website (www.speedtrap.org), a popular listing of known speed traps across the United States.

Speedtrap.org is the oldest active website on the Internet devoted to exposing unethical law enforcement practices. Over the past decade the website has helped countless drivers avoid unjust tickets by leveraging its extensive database of speed trap listings. And now, after an extensive redesign of the website, the Speed Trap Exchange is even more driver-friendly.

Along with a whole new “look”, the Speed Trap Exchange will include a geographical mapping feature that will allow users to pinpoint the exact location of a speed trap, as well as aid travelers in identifying the location of speed traps on the route they intend to take to their destination.

The new website will continue to offer the opportunity to describe and discuss specific speed traps, as well as rate the quality of the listing. These discussions are often even more enlightening than the speed trap listings itself and the new speed trap rating system will allow drivers to quickly identify the most egregious speed traps.

While some communities and enforcement agencies object to being included in the Speed Trap Exchange, it’s important to note that the Speed Trap Exchange was not created to condone reckless or irresponsible driving. The National Motorists Association has long opposed the use of traffic enforcement for the purpose of revenue generation, of which speed traps are the most flagrant example.

The new NMA Speed Trap Exchange website is completely free, easy-to-use, and has proven itself to be very useful for anyone who spends time on the road. You are encouraged to view the listings in your area and add any speed traps that may be missing.

To see what everyone is talking about, check out www.speedtrap.org.

How To Objectively Identify Unsafe Drivers

By Eric Peters, Automotive Columnist

For years I have been arguing that the most objective — and perhaps, definitive — measure of a driver’s ability to drive safely is whether he or she has been involved in an at-fault accident.

Speeding tickets, for example, don’t really tell us whether a person is a safe/competent driver. They just tell us that person was caught driving faster than a number posted on a sign — which may be illegal, but by no means necessarily unsafe.

For example, it’s today perfectly legal to drive 65 or 70 mph on most highways. But during the “Drive 55″ era, such speeds were illegal. Did it suddenly become safe to drive at 65 or 70 on those same roads? Of course not. The law changed, that’s all.

Also: Skill varies. Some drivers are perfectly able to handle a car at 80 or 90 mph as well or better than some drivers can handle the same car at 60 mph. But the system considers the former as an “unsafe driver” simply by dint of his faster driving.

The point being, faster drivers aren’t necessarily unsafe drivers.

Insurance industry stats bear this out, incidentally. Faster drivers actually tend to have fewer accidents than slow-pokes. Also, while it’s true that driving faster can increase the amount of damage/severity of injury if there’s a crash, it does not follow that the risk of having a crash increases simply because “x” is traveling faster than “y.”

Unfortunately, our dumbed down speed limits force everyone to drive at the level of the least competent. We also do nothing meaningful to deal with those marginal/iffy drivers. They can have multiple at-fault accidents — and their license will be in less peril than the driver who has never had an at-fault accident but who has a couple “reckless driving” tickets — which in many states are issued as a matter of course for merely driving faster than 20 mph over the posted limit. (During the “Drive 55″ era, one could get a “reckless driving” cite for doing 76 mph on the freeway. Today the exact same speed is either legal — or a minor ticket.)

It’s nonsense.

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Short Red-Light Camera Grace Period Leads To Ticket Refunds

Last week, Daniel Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer publicized the story of a local driver who was unjustly ticketed:

Mike Kochkodin didn’t think his car blew the traffic signal on Roosevelt Boulevard. But a few days after the white light flashed, a $100 ticket arrived by mail at his Central Pennsylvania home.

[...]

When the notice from the Philadelphia Parking Authority came, it gave instructions on how to view the three photos taken of the car: as it approached the intersection, midway through, then afterward as the rear license plate was visible.

The lawyer son, who’d gone to Penn and is also called Mike, noticed some small numbers displayed atop the photographs. He wasn’t sure what they meant, so he read some of the fine print on the red-light program’s Web site.

It described how when lights turn red at 10 intersections on the boulevard, sensors in the pavement trigger overhead cameras. But drivers are given a grace period. The cameras are supposed to wait one-third of a second before snapping.

Which made the younger Kochkodin wonder what the “0.2″ meant in the first photo. He drove to the camera program’s office on Grant Avenue in the Northeast, and there he learned that the number meant the camera had snapped at 0.2 seconds, instead of at 0.33 seconds.

He scheduled a hearing. That took place Sept. 10 and didn’t last long. Case dismissed.

The elder Mike Kochkodin - “I never trusted these cameras from day one,” he says — asked the hearing officer what would happen to others who got caught by a too-quick camera. The officer, Kochkodin said, said he’d toss any others he saw.

Which leads to the question: Just how many people got snapped too soon?

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