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Traffic and Road Safety
Topic: Some people believe that the best way to increase the road safety is to increase the minimum legal age for driving cars. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Model answer:
Many are of the opinion that raising the age at which people can get driving licenses is the best way to make roads safer. Although this will help prevent some accidents due to inexperience, I strongly feel that it is more important to focus on safer roads through improved urban planning.
The main justification that proponents of raising the age at which people can drive will often cite is the number of accidents attributed to inexperience. In the USA, most teenagers get their driving permit around age 16. There are a couple of factors that can lead a 16 year-old to cause more accidents than someone in their 20s. The first is that they simply do not have as much road experience. They have only dealt with a limited number of experiences and are more likely to make poor decisions at pivotal moments. The other reason is that many American teenagers begin drinking alcohol around this age even though the legal age is 21. Teenagers are notoriously irresponsible and they have not developed strategies for handling alcohol when driving. All people, when drunk, are dangerous but it is especially dangerous if they are inexperienced in terms of both alcohol and driving.
Even though these are valid points, I do not think they outweigh the number of accidents that poor urban planning and infrastructure cause. There will always be other causes that include young drivers, driving while under the influence and road rage but the only factor that plays a hand in nearly all accidents relates to how the roads have been planned. Take the city of New Orleans for example. The urban planners in New Orleans constructed the city with almost entirely one-way streets. This may make it inconvenient at times but it has also resulted in one of the lowest accident rates in the USA. It has also allowed for the construction of parallel streetcars that have also greatly reduced the number of accidents. Cities around the world have replicated this approach by increasing the number of one-way streets and working streetcars into the city plan and seen reciprocal declines in vehicular accidents.
I believe that urban planning, despite not being a well-publicized cause, is the main source of most accidents around the world and raising the legal driving age would have little real impact. The more cities that begin to focus their attention on the causes, rather than the symptoms, of accidents the safer our roads will be for ourselves and future generations.
