There is also no testing or vision rechecking requirement, so there are just a lot of people on the roads who should probably have their license taken away.
Michigan takes car culture seriously. You have to parallel park on the drivers test, and the Secretary of State offices (there is no DMV, because what a waste of taxpayer funds...) have eye charts when you renew your license.
CA here. The eye charts are a joke. They’re visible at all times so you could easily memorize them during your long wait (even with appointment); and the specific line they have you read is huge. I’ve never looked into it but I suspect it’s just to show you can read a sign on the highway.
Your comment seems odd. If the vision test is enough to show you can read a sign on the highway, why does that make it a joke?
Are you suggesting that someone shouldn't have a license if their vision is not correctable to 20/20, even if it's good enough for all essential driving tasks?
It’s a joke because the testing method is inadequate to prevent even the simplest of cheating and does not adequately test that the driver’s vision legally qualifies for an unrestricted license.
I never realized our test was anything strange. Parallel parking was the big scary part of the test but I remember it being huge, almost two car lengths long or something. It was very easy.
The eye chart machines (they are electronic and usually at each clerk window) look like they are from the 70s for what its worth.
WA allows renewal by mail without even stepping into an office.
WA also allows transferring of drivers licenses without additional testing. To me, this is the most problematic part, because different states have different rules around priority, proper usage of the left lane, etc. and WA is a transplant destination, and the resulting mix of driver backgrounds is chaotic. As a general example, in WA pedestrians have priority at all intersections, including where there is no visibly marked crosswalk, but this is not true in all states.
Young people get into more crashes (and more deadly crashes) than old people, we should probably just flat out not allow people under 25 to drive long before we get around to worrying about things like vision checks.
Young people have more accidents because they have less experience driving. Raising the driving age doesn't help with that. If anything it should be lowered so that more of the learning period occurs when people are still under parental supervision.
It's also because younger people are more impulsive. If the driving age were raised to 25 there would be fewer accidents among beginner drivers. Of course it would be terrible in so many other ways, but the point is the accidents are not just about lack of experience.
I agree that having more of a supervised learning period would be a good idea.
> It's also because younger people are more impulsive.
This is more of a stereotype than a universal constant, and you could just as easily say things like "younger people have faster reflexes and better eyesight" etc.
The question isn't whether some group in the aggregate has different statistical properties, it's whether we're willing to discriminate against an entire class of people, including the ones who aren't the cause of it, because of that statistical correlation.
Which is the same reason people saying things like "people over 65 should have their license taken away" are just as wrong.
> This is more of a stereotype than a universal constant,
It's a well-known fact.
You may also observe how prisons are full of young people. Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences.
If I were to pick qualities for a driver, and had to choose between 'Makes good decisions' versus 'Faster reflexes', I'd pick the former any day.
Note that we don't let 12 year-olds drive. We have arbitrary age cutoffs that have nothing to do with quantifiable capability.
> Brains that are still developing are far more likely to make really stupid decisions without regard for consequences.
Then how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds?
> If I were to pick qualities for a driver, and had to choose between 'Makes good decisions' versus 'Faster reflexes', I'd pick the former any day.
But now we're back to experience, and you have to be allowed to do the thing before you can get that.
> Note that we don't let 12 year-olds drive. We have arbitrary age cutoffs that have nothing to do with quantifiable capability.
We do, but we shouldn't. If a 12-year-old can pass the driver's test then either that 12-year-old is competent to drive or your driver's test is inadequate in testing drivers.
> how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds?
You'd want to look at the age at which someone committed the crime for which they are imprisoned, not their current age, to assess the affect of age on crime-related statistics. Also, the juvenile justice system typically lets people out at 18 or 20, unless they were charged as an adult. So you don't have the same buildup of late teenagers being imprisoned at 20 as you do for people who are older.
It is factually the case that brain development continues until around age 25. The impulsive areas of the brain develop/myelinate earlier than than the prefrontal cortex, for example, which exercises executive function and impulse control.
> It is factually the case that brain development continues until around age 25
No, its factually the case that brain development continues for most of life, with different capacities peaking at wildly different ages on average (with some peaking after others have gone into significant decline), and considerable variation between individuals in each capacity, with executive function, specifically, reaching a plateau starting around the mid-20s on average (but again with considerable variation among individuals.)
> Then how come there are so many more 40 year olds in prison than 20 year olds?
Because age demographics of prison are very distant from age demographics of people committing crimes at the time they commit them for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that imprisonment happens after conviction which happens after the crime. But also because of both discretionary leniency to first time offenders (which younger criminals are more likely to be) and younger criminals even apart from whether they are first time offenders, and because of formal enhancements to punishment for repeat offenders, which combined mean that, for otherwise similar immediate predicate offenses, older criminals are more likely to be imprisoned at all and likely to be imprisoned longer.
Most of those would explain a delay of a couple years, not a couple decades, and the rest is rather the point. If this was disproportionately youthful indiscretion then there wouldn't be many repeat offenders in their late 20s and 30s, since they'd have grown out of it.
