Teen Drivers Are a Threat

It's a normal Friday night and Alicia is getting ready to leave to go get ice cream with a normal sixteen year old boy. Her father, Dr. Arturo Betancourt and his wife Lulu, confirm it is all right for her to go out, but first they had to meet the boy and told her she had to be home by curfew. "I want to speak to him," Dr. Betancourt told Alicia. He even reminded her to avoid distracting him when he's driving (Stafford, 3). Sometimes Alicia would complain about her early curfew, but she always obeyed it. That night she didn't come home. Several hours after Alicia's curfew the Betancourt's began to worry so they decided to call the cops. The dispatcher spoke calmly and asked them to stay at home. It was at this moment that Dr. Arturo Betancourt realized his daughter was dead! Alicia, who was wearing a seatbelt, had been killed instantly in a terrible crash. The young male driver had lost control of the car and hit a utility pole. (Stafford 9)

Weeks after the crash, Alicia's father began looking online for anything that had to do with teen driving. He was especially surprised to find out that teenagers have the highest crash and death rates on the road, especially sixteen year olds who are at the greatest risk (Stafford 11). Incidents and depressing stories such as this happen throughout the nation and began to multiply as the years go by. Some experts are even calling this a "national health epidemic" (Stafford 14). Many experts agree that something needs to be done, "If we had any other disease that was wiping out our teenagers at the rate of thousands per year, there would be no end to what we would do as a society to stop that," says traffic expert Dr. Runge (Stafford, 15). Clearly, the best and most obvious answer is to raise the minimum driving age. Throughout this paper I will discuss and argue why it would be best to raise the minimum driving age to the age of eighteen.

It is reported that there are more teen fatalities on the road each year than the amount of deaths reported from 9/11 (Oztalay, 2). The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report an average of 3,500 to 4,000 drivers aged 15 to 20 years old die in road case accident every year. More than two-thirds of fatal single-vehicle crashes involved a teen driver. Nearly three-fourths of those drivers were 16 years old. The rate of involvement for 16 year old drivers is nearly five times that of drivers ages 20 and older. Throughout the nation, an average of two people die every day because of vehicles drove by sixteen year olds.

In most states of the United States of America you have to meet three requirements to obtain a drivers license. You must be at least 16 years old, pass a state-recognized drivers education course, and verify you have spent at least 25 hours of supervised time behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle. You are also required to spend anywhere from 6 months to 1 year with a drivers permit before obtaining a license. While these requirements are strict and force future drivers to earn a lot of experience behind the wheel it doesn't change the fact that most teens just aren't mature enough yet to hold onto a license.

A growing number of studies are showing results that sixteen and seventeen year olds are just too young to be driving without supervision. Many people throughout the nation think it is a good idea to raise the driving age to eighteen. This is proven in a USA Today/CNN survey shows that 61% of the population thought a sixteen year old is not old enough to have a license and of the remaining thirty-nine percent only thirty percent thought it was okay to license a sixteen year old. Even a survey by teen magazine showed that some sixteen year olds thought they were too young to have a license.

New findings from brain researchers at the National Institutes of Health show why efforts to protect young teens usually fail. The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is to blame or the part of the brain that weighs risks, make judgments, and controls impulsive behavior. The researchers at the National Institutes of Health show that this part of the brain is not fully developed and normally isn't fully developed until 25. This slow developing process plays many dirty tricks on young teens, whose hormones are churning. While their bodies turn more adult like, these hormones encourage more risk taking and thrill seeking. These hormones then fire up the limbic system or the part of the brain responds to pleasure and this makes it difficult for young teens to make quick wise decisions. This undeveloped part of the brain also makes it difficult for teens to realize what the long term consequences of certain decisions such as driving fast or driving drunk. When a teen is driving fifteen to twenty miles per hour over the speed limit the limbic system the part of the brain that responds to pleasure, is working perfectly, but the part that warns of negative consequences is all but useless. Also when the