HowToMakeTravelSafe

Don't let 17-25 year-olds drive cars. Instead restrict them to motorbikes (or non-powered vehicles).

Pro:

• TestosteronePoisonedIdiots will AutoDarwinate when, had they been driving a car, they would injure or kill others.
• more people gain experience of being vulnerable on the roads, hopefuly encouraging them to be more careful when (or indeed if) they do later start driving cars instead.
• less congestion: most motorbikes take up less road space than most cars.
• such views are (often?) held by cyclists and (ex-)moped riders. Suggests that these people believe they learned useful things from their experiences, without dying.
• will help the population to adjust when we run out of oil. 8-)

Con:

• less transport flexibility for those affected.
• motorbikes are noisy!
• watch the kids on scooters round here, then wonder whether it's really a good idea to encourage them.

Variations:

• how to deal with CortisolPoisonedIdiots? These come in all age groups.
• all traffic offences to require the driver to re-take the current driving test, on the assumption that ingrained habits will be difficult to hide from the examiner. See also http://www.iam.org.uk/ .

• Some 'testosterone-poisoned idiots' will kill other such through no fault of the target.

More so than were going to kill people with cars?

• Therefore go one step further and allow them non-powered vehicles only.

• They'll get much needed exercise that way.

[Pallando] Similar to the proposal that all cars should have contact mines on the outside. I personally like the digital graffitti idea, whereby other road users can spend 'karma' points to comment on the driving of other licence plates, with a max speed limiter in the car controlled by your karma rating.

Hmmm... No.

For a start, you'd wipe out quite a lot of the 17 - 25 year olds whether they were TPI or not. An awful lot of motorbike / moped accidents happen because car drivers (and you have to assume that at some transition period we have a lot of old fashioned, "motorbikes, what are those?.... ooops" car drivers on the roads, rather than those that were trained by fire and thus sympathetic) are not expecting motorbikes. Making our least experienced road users most vunerable is fine to kill off the really stupid ones, but I fear you'd take an awful lot of simply unlucky ones with them. In a car car accident both parties can be fine a lot of the time nowadays. A car bike accident is far more likely to lead to fatalities just because of the vulnerabililty of the person on the bike. And accidents don't just happen to bad drivers, just unlucky inexperienced ones.

Also, I'm assuming a lot of accidents with 17 - 25 year olds happen after parties, when people are tired / slightly drunk or hungover / inexperienced and driving home. I have no idea if this is true, but it seems a nice sweeping plausible generalisation. But at least with cars it is likely (at least in sensible groups of friends, of which there are many) that one person won't mind not drinking for an evening so long as it's not their turn next time. With motorbikes there's never the option of "No, let me give you a lift".

Also, I'm not arguing that drivers couldn't do with being more careful, but an awful lot of accidents are caused by timid drivers (ok, mainly because they aggravate the TPI behind them to the point where they overtake when they shouldn't have, but they can also be ludicrously frustrating). Excessive care and timidity doesn't make a good driver.

Sigh, this is turning into a rant... it doesn't even sort out the congestion, as you just have five motorbikes buzzing around to every one car. Young people are usually better at car sharing / environmentally friendly and just generally friendly stuff than old people.

As well as this, there's the impossibility of training people to be good motorbike riders. In driving lessons we have dual controls, and an examiner by your side watching your every move and able to take the control off you at any time. You're not allowed out on your own until after you've passed your test. Moped training is one 4 hour course, with an instructor a hundred feet behind hissing static into your radio, which I passed even though I fell off going round a bend. After that you can go wherever and whenever you want, on your own, so long as you have Lplates on. And I can't see how thay could do it better / would want to change it.

Why, why this discrimination against the under 25's? Why not acknowledge that we need better lessons - 20 pounds a lesson means that everyone will try to take their test when they're not ready, and by sheer luck many hundreds pass. Why won't the government realise that driving is more of an essential skill for getting jobs and living well than PE and maths and home economics and give us lessons all through secondary school, that *don't* end after you've passed your test - then we won't get incompetents on a four laned motorway on their own after never having driven outside Cambridge before? Yes, I'm more in favour of public transport and cycling and everything, but for hundreds of kids living in pokey little dead end villages over 10 miles away from their school with no bus route a car is so nice... If this is a "cars are evil" page than discriminate fairly, otherwise under your policies you'd just find pages in 20 years time on "Why are the 25 - 31 year olds such crap drivers?" It's not youth and hormones, it's inexperience of driving. Riding motorbikes doesn't teach you to drive, and nor does waiting 8 years.

I claim (without a hint of modesty) that the current audience will, by self-selection, tend to have better than average BootstrapEnlightenment skills.

Do we believe that a useful fraction of the (surviving) TPI population will translate "car drivers treat me badly when I'm on my (motor)bike" into "I should treat other road users with respect"?

In order to make these ponderings more informed, it would be useful to know the stats for drivers causing injury or death: previous accidents, previous traffic offences, previous modes of transport, other indicators (alcohol, testosterone, cortisol, when they last slept, whether they blamed others for the accident).