<p>Not sure what you are saying. Are you saying we as a society “tolerate” car accidents? In the example you provided, this speed demon’s actions were not condoned-his license was suspended. How do you prevent someone from willfully breaking the law and driving when specifically forbidden to do so?</p>
<p>And what is the solution for the high death rate from car accidents? We could raise the driving age. It probably would be a good idea. But I don’t see that happening any time soon without a major grass roots move to do so.</p>
<p>So sorry for the familys’ losses. Our state also has restrictions on who can ride in cars with drivers under 18. Not sure how much that has helped, but it is a step in the right direction.</p>
<p>We can do a lot more to prevent all of this. For starters, we shouldn’t rely solely on laws to prevent children from making foolish mistakes. That’s a parent’s job. I doubt that that pickup truck at issue here was purchased by a high schooler with money he earned on his own. Someone gave it to him, loaned it to him, or helped him buy it. Somebody said it was OK for these kids to take it on this 2-hour drive late at night after the game (if they’d broken rules to sneak around, they wouldn’t have been texting updates home).</p>
<p>People in the community will understandably, and correctly, wish to avoid causing the parents any more pain. But other parents have to learn from this or it will keep happening.</p>
<p>One law we might change is to use a raised age or elevated licensing requirement for driving trucks outside of a work context. They aren’t passenger cars, so people using them as passenger cars should have to prove they have the special skills necessary to drive them safely. This goes for trucks with passenger seating nailed on top (aka SUVs) as well.</p>
<p>There are lots of other laws we could pass that have nothing to do with this accident, but would prevent others. We could require bar owners in regions where everyone drives to provide breathalyzer checks before customers leave the parking lot. We could require all vehicles on the road to have uniform bumpers so that trucks don’t ride on top of passenger cars and crush them. We could have much more serious penalties (like loss of license, instead of a ticket) for driving without a seatbelt or while texting.</p>
<p>“Are you saying we as a society “tolerate” car accidents?”</p>
<p>Yes, we do. If terrorists killed 35,000 Americans in 2009, you’d have your grass roots movement in place overnight. People would be willing to make tremendous sacrifices to try to change that number, just as they did after Sep. 11. Look at the indignities and intrusions we put up with in the airport for what are likely modest safety gains; look at the way we lined up to give blood in the hope of helping survivors; look at the number of people who joined the armed forces in an attempt to prevent more deaths from terrorist attacks. We don’t tolerate terrorist attacks. We do tolerate traffic deaths.</p>
<p>Thank you, Hanna, you stated the case much better than I could have. One of the things I would like to see is some type of driving simulator used in Driver’s Ed programs. Surely it would be possible to devise something that could be put into widespread use on which kids and people ticketed for poor driving could be required to log so many hours. </p>
<p>One of the leading factors in crashes is pure inexperience on the part of the driver. And they often don’t GET experience in their DE class, because you can’t simulate snow, ice, going too fast, or other conditions that drivers encounter on the road.</p>