Nobody’s forcing you to buy those products
Granted I may use only 5 gallons per week to commute, but less than that if I throw in a bike day or 2, helps my back, and I do not think the calories consume, though I might eat a double cheeseburger as a consolation.
Or an ageing person. I continue with a manual transmission because it keeps me focused on my driving. From what I observe I am still driving better than most but have been adjusting my driving as I age. Teenagers are potentially the best drivers. They only lack experience.
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How are teenage drivers potentially the best drivers . . . if they pay more attention to their cell phones than the road
Never underestimate the ability of petty bureaucrats and fanatics in a position of power to double down on their “good idea” even in the face of obvious unintended consequences.
Sometimes the only solution is to simply ignore their edicts and do what we want anyway, overwhelming the authority’s ability to enforce the law. That’s how we got rid of the 55 mph speed limit, prohibition, and increasingly today, the illegality of marijuana.
Teenagers have potentially better reflexes…but that’s only one small aspect of driving skills. Driver attention and experience are by far the best skills needed to be the best driver. Those are qualities that most teenagers lack.
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Teenagers are potentially the WORST drivers . . . if they keep their eyes on their smartphones, versus paying attention to the road, other drivers, traffic signs, the speed limit, etc.
That was an extreme example, but teenagers are often not very mature, and thus don’t have the discipline that SOME of the older drivers have
I live in an addition with 52 homes. We now have 8 teenage drivers and apparently stop signs and looking before backing out of drive ways means nothing to them.
“apparently stop signs and looking before backing out of drive ways means nothing to them.”
Doesn’t sound like the best drivers to me 
Was out getting hours in for my license with my mom, ran a stop sign and she said pull over and wait for the police, after about 10 minutes I was allowed to drive on. I am safety conscious, and stuff still happens. The other day I was backing out of the drive, did not see any pedestrians, they must have been in the perfect blinds spot behind a pillar, and noticed them in my passenger side mirror, they had stopped, I stopped before the sidewalk, luckily I and them were both aware, but that could have been a recipe for disaster.
Had a young lady blow through a stop sign she didn’t know was there. She blasted her horn at me and gave me the salute. I just continued on thankful I saw her.
Isn’t it ironic that in most cases, the person who actually committed a driving infraction and who almost caused a collision, is the one to take offense and to give “the salute”?
Teenagers have better reflexes, often better vision and hearing, and perhaps even even better ability to focus than those of us who are somewhat long-in-the-tooth. Unfortunately, that’s a small part of what makes a safe driver. The ability to anticipate far ahead what will happen, the ability to see what’s developing blocks ahead, the ability and habit of focusing on the other drivers, and the knowledge of how much time will be necessary to react along with the patience to give oneself that time, those are far more important than the things the young kids possess. Much of this can only be acquired through experience.
A trap shooter gets better with practice not because he/she develops better eyesight, but because he/she develops the ability to predict where the clay bird will be based on an observation of its speed and trajectory. I believe the ability to predict that comes with experience is the single most crucial driving skill.
Some years back when I was still commuting, I was driving in a snowstorm south on a divided highway (the Everett Turnpike through Manchester, NH). I was in the left lane and saw a car coming off the highway onramp with a young lady driving that clearly was going a bit too fast. I slowed significantly, and someone behind me started beeping, angry that I was slowing in the left lane. The car from the ramp slid right across both of the southbound lanes and bounced off the Jersey barrier back up into the lanes… sideways. Had I not slowed, someone might have gotten killed. I offer this as only one example of the ability to predict that comes from experience prevented a multicar accident and possibly a death. I have countless examples.
In summary, even those teenagers that do concentrate on their driving, and there are many, still need experience to become as safe as drivers with decades of experience. I write this knowing that at some point most drivers who live long enough lose too much vision, hearing, and/or cognitive abilities to still be safe drivers. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I know of no way, including testing, to clearly determine when someone gets too old to drive. There are many, many elderly drivers who compensate successfully for their aging senses, and the statistics show it. Note that this was written by an old guy who has successfully developed compensations… he thinks. 
I don’t like make generalizations about the driving skills of a particular age group. Our son, who is now in his early 40s, has never had an accident. When he was a college sophomore, he was on an internship in Appalachian country and transported children in a.15 passenger van over treacherous mountain roads. I have an 80 year old musician friend in our band who is.a very good driver and also bicycles 20 to 30 miles a.day five days a week. One of his vehicles is a 1996 Dodge truck with a big V8 and manual transmission. I really like riding with him in that truck. On the other hand, while I was still working. I had colleagues in their 30s who would scare me just driving around the college campus.
Yeah agree, we should be a little careful. If I’m driving 50,000 miles a year on two lane roads, my odds of an adverse encounter are a little higher than my school teacher wife driving a couple miles to school. Some one please tell her. Its like rolling the dice 100 times compared to twice. You’re bound to roll snake eyes once out of one hundred attempts.
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If by “bound to” you mean it’s a certainty, then no. No matter how many times you rolled the dice without rolling snake eyes, the odds of rolling snake eyes on the next throw is still one out of 36. The dice don’t know or keep track of how they landed on previous throws. See “gambler’s fallacy”.
The odds of surviving one hundred throws without rolling snake eyes on a fair pair of dice is (35/36)^100 = 0.0598 or one in 16.728.
Hee hee hee. Yeah, that’s what the math guys say but if you had to bet on one of us, would you bet on me rolling 100 times or my wife rolling twice? See? Even though the odds are the same for each roll, I think you’d bet on me.
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