Given that 16 to 18 year olds were involved in 25% of all traffic collisions in the SCV as recently as 2005, and given that our streets encourage highway-like speeds, this is the best news all week:
There was a time when many teenagers rushed out to get their driver’s license upon turning 16, but that number has dropped significantly in recent years, according to state and federal statistics.
Figures from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the national Census Bureau show that 70,455, or 13 percent of the state’s 544,341 16-year-olds, got their licenses between 2005 and 2009.
That’s a significant decline from the 100,403, or 23 percent, of California’s 432,788 16-year-olds who received their licenses from 1995 through 1999.
It’d be interesting to see how many 16 and 17 year olds are licensed today in the SCV compared with, say, my teenage years in the early 90s. Back in my pimply-faced youth, when I blasted Green Day from my tiny Nissan truck, having a driver’s license and a car was not just a right of passage, but was practical too. The distances between homes and high schools in the SCV can be great, and with one brother in elementary school and the other in junior high, my mom practically begged me to drive myself to Hart High.
Of course, even if fewer 16 and 17 year olds are on the road, that doesn’t necessarily mean our streets are safer as a result. Maybe the douchiness and disregard for others just gets delayed into the late teen years and even into the 20s. That’d be the conclusion I draw from all the 20 something men who die on motorcycles around town, not to mention the two-time DUI offenders who slam into groups of cyclists up on Bouquet.
Or to put it another way, have you ever been to COC when class lets out? It’s as bad as any of the high schools around lunch time.
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