Raising the Driving Age Becca McSweeney, Amy Stone, Dakota Weaver

 Yes, it will save lives but not teen drivers are not all to blame.  Drinking while “under the influence” causes a lot of car crashes too.  About 23% of drivers ages 15 to 20 who died in car crashes had a Blood Alcohol Counts of 0.08 or higher.

 Decrease amount of teen fatalities.  Make it harder on parents, because they have to drive their kids around two extra years.  18 is the year most people go off to college so when the teen turns 18 it will be time for them to go to college. Then they wont be able to drive their siblings around.  Might cause more stress to families with a lot of children.

 Decrease teen fatalities from car crashes.  Raising the driving age will mean that fewer cars will be driven. Having fewer vehicles on the road. Firstly, it will reduce overcrowding on the roads, easing congestion and allowing the remaining traffic to flow more freely. Secondly cars are a major source of pollution and especially pump out a lot of carbon which contributes to climate change. Any measure which reduces car use should therefore be supported.  Raising the driving age would also help us tackle obesity. Lack of exercise is a major reason why many people are hugely overweight. Obesity leads to ill health for the individual, and society suffers through higher taxes to pay for the extra healthcare spending, as well as from lower economic output. Many teens are obese and raising the driving age would force them to walk instead of riding, giving them much-needed exercise is also a time when people develop habits that will stick with them for life. This means that raising the driving age will have a wider impact as people will grow up less dependent on their cars.

 Many teens are safe and careful drivers, and almost all adult drivers today started before they were 18. It would be unfair to punish all 16 and 17 year olds for the bad behavior of a few. Instead of a blanket measure like raising the driving age, there are other steps we could take to make the roads safer. We could make the driving test tougher. We could require a retest after compulsory retraining for any new driver caught driving badly. And we could make it so that parents decide if their child is responsible enough to take a driving test.  Young drivers do have more accidents, but that is because they are not very experienced, not simply because they are under 18. If we raise the driving age, it will be year old new drivers having more accidents instead of year olds. After all, men are 77% more likely than women to kill someone while at the wheel, so if we went just by statistics we would ban all male drivers.