Yes, it’s a fact that young drivers are more likely to get into accidents than more experienced ones; this is because experienced drivers have experienced situations where they could have been in accidents. Experience being the one thing that you can’t get in a classroom or in a syllabus.
Which is the second reason1 this article grinds my gears.
The driving age will effectively rise to 18 in a major overhaul of how young people are prepared for the road.
Learners will still be granted their provisional licence from 17, but will need a year to pass a beefed-up test.
It means the minimum age at which a new driver could realistically go out on his or her own will be 18.
The move follows a Daily Mail campaign, backed by the insurance industry, road safety campaigners and motoring groups, to raise the formal driving age to 18 to help cut accidents caused by young drivers.
Road safety figures show that one in five new drivers aged between 17 to 19 crash within a year of passing their test. But for 17-year-olds the risk reduces by 43 per cent after the first year of driving.
The problem isn’t the age of the drivers. It’s the amount of time they have been driving in the real world. Driving in a supervised fashion to rack up hours in some damn silly log book isn’t real world, it’s an extension of a cushy classroom existence, with the added downside that most people will have to pay a fortune for it.
Suggestions like this are really quite silly; they’ll do very little to improve matters, but at immense cost. Whereas I’ve already provided a simpler, cheaper solution, and what thanks do I get, eh?
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1 – The first of course is that it’s a Mail article, which can do nobody’s blood pressure any good at all.