Two More Driving Age Petitions

Two more petitions about driving ages, just like the ones I talked about in Driving Ages and Driving Ages Again.

The first petition is entitled Raise the minimum driving age from 17 years old to 25 years old and the explanatory notes say

"70% of accidents are caused by the youngest 30% of drivers. Raising the minimum driving age to 25 years would ease congestion, improve road safety and reduce the number of road-traffic accidents exponentially."

While 70% of accidents may be caused by the youngest 30% of drivers, I maintain that unless you've compared what proportion of accidents are caused by, say, the 30% most inexperienced drivers, you have no evidence at all that age is in the least bit relevant.

Further, I maintain that it's grossly unfair to arbitrarily select young people to penalise so strongly just to alleviate congestion.

The petition is entitled Increase the age of driving to 21 and the explanatory notes say

"I believe that if the age of learning to drive was increased to 20 with a year of learning before taking the test was put in place, this would dramatically reduce the accidents and road deaths due to immature drivers. This would also have a massive impact on current road conjestion (not reducing but keeping the level current) with very few new drivers taking to the roads, giving the government more time to tackle conjestion problems. It would also lower carbon emmisions and lower insurance premiums for safer drivers and force the government to improve public transport as more people would be forced to use rather than drive to work etc."

Aside from a temporary hiatus, you would presumably have exactly the same number of new drivers as you get now; they would just be doing it later.

Four petitions making exactly the same spurious, illogical, unscientific arguments. Only qualifying as not-duplicate, presumably, because they've each chosen a different arbitrary minimum age that would be "more acceptable" to them personally to have people driving at.