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☕ KimBoo York's avatar

The statistics are heartbreaking and difficult to deal with. As Gen x I have the same quandaries you do about the balance between saving lives and allowing kids to have some Independence.

But I think a major solution is being overlooked here, which is public transportation. Most teens have no choice but to drive if they're going to get where they want to go. They can't just hop a train in the suburbs and roll into downtown to meet their friends, or take a bus to a different neighborhood to hang out.

And I think it's important to acknowledge that for a lot of parents, the act of allowing their child to drive the car or even buying their teenager a car is a form of cultural initiation in America where car culture reigns supreme. I know that's a bigger problem, but still it strikes me as an important part of this whole issue.

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Kevin's avatar

Fun story - I once designed a new community next to a community college. We had a lovely boulevard-ish street design as a new street leading to the college, with a landscaped median and a 10 foot travel lane in each direction. The traffic engineer for the city told us he wanted wider lanes, because young people are bad drivers. He pushed for 13 foot lanes. Seriously. So I said - "the idea is they're bad, so we're going to encourage speeding and recklessness?" He had a hard time answering that, but still he insisted on "wider lanes = safer."

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