> 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.
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.