Raising the Driving Age

Robin
November 23, 2010

For at least the last ten years, the issue of whether or not to raise the driving age to 18 years old has been a touchy subject on every level of the spectrum; from State Highway Safety Association to teenagers and everybody in between. Although everyone has some degree of approval that raising the driving age would be a good idea no one has really put forth the effort to actually have it come to pass. This has lead to the ongoing debate of whether it should even be a consideration anymore. There are several reasons that establishing the driving age at 18 is a legitimate idea. First, by having the driving age moved to the minimum of 18 this can be both environmentally and economically commendable. Also, teenagers under the age of 18 are more mentally underdeveloped when it comes to making sound decisions on the road, which then leads teenagers to having one of the highest fatality rates involving automobiles.
  Global warming has become key issue all over the world, especially in more over-crowded counties and cities, due to higher volume of emissions being released into the air. In the year 2000, the Carbon Emissions that are released into the air by cars in the United States is 302 Million Metric tons (MMTc) (Environmental). In that same year, there were 190 million licensed drivers in the United States, and 9,743,000 were drivers under the age of 19 (U.S), that’s five percent of the population. I know it doesn’t seem like that much but when you take in consideration the total emissions being released into the air and multiply it by the number of teenage drivers, that will reduce the amount of emissions by 15.1 MMTc. People are desperate to help stop global warming; one way we can do this is to reduce the amount of drivers on the roads and create a more accessible public transportation in rural areas. Increasing the age for driving would also be beneficial to parents of teen drivers due to the fact that insuring a teen driver... [continues]

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