Driving Ages Again

The petition is entitled Increase the minimum legal age to drive cars to 20 years old and the explanatory notes say

"If the minimum legal age to start driving a car was 20 years old, congestion would immediately be cut by a certain percentage, and the roads would be safer as a result, because young people would have had the chance to grow up a little and calm down ... before taking to the road. There would also, as a result of this proposed change, be less accidents."

Oh look, an almost identical petition to the one I talked about in Driving Ages yesterday. OK, this one says 20 instead of 19, but ... people really ought to look for duplicates.

The Facts and Figures page for the Petitions site says (emphasis mine):

"An early question for the site's administrators was what to do about petitions which were identical or very similar to ones already on the site. Some users contacted us saying that duplicate petitions should be rejected, because they add confusion and clutter the site. On the other hand, we felt it was unfair to pick one petition from a number of similar proposals, and reject the rest.

As a first step, mySociety, the charity who built the site for us, added a search box to the petition creation process, prompting users to check whether they would like to sign an existing petition before creating a new one. Eventually, though, we decided to change site policy to reject petitions which appear to be duplicates. However, if a user feels strongly that their petition really is different from others, they are still able to resubmit."

Presumably, therefore, the either the moderators didn't think that this constituted a duplicate petition (odd), or the creator of this petition didn't. Either way someone was a muppet.

And that's before we point out that the petitioner's a muppet for thinking this, too.

I don't believe accident rates are high among the young because they're young. I believe it's because they're inexperienced. This Nottingham University research project's brief suggests that it's the inexperience not the youth that causes it, but admittedly I can't find any studies saying so specifically. So it's my opinion against the petitioner's, I suppose. But this is my blog, so I'm going to say they're muppets and I'm right.

I suppose I should say that I suppose it's possible that congestion would be reduced. But at what cost? You could reduce congestion by banning any age-group or any other arbitrary group from driving: it doesn't seem justified to do so, though.