In Texas, you can easily acquire a license at the age of 16 and renew it whenever needed by simply submitting documents to your local Department of Public Safety office. To many people, driving is a necessary privilege to work, run errands or go anywhere at all with a heavy lack of accessible public transportation. The United States has the highest vehicle usage in the world. Naturally, there will be more drivers on the roads and this will only increase as the years go by. This also means there will be an increase in incompetent drivers. This incompetency is a common sight for many, whether it’s pulling out of a high school parking lot or watching someone make a last-minute exit by cutting across four lanes.
Acquiring and maintaining a license is far too easy. If you drive, it’s more than likely you’ve run into a bad driver, and it’s also likely you’ve felt the need to retaliate by honking or some other petty action. Incompetency not only further increases the chances of motor accidents but also increases the likelihood of a road-rage altercation. Having incompetent drivers on the roads adds many more risks than there already are.
Major vehicle manufacturers today such as MOPAR, General Motors, BMW and many more, engineer new safety features to constantly increase driver and passenger safety in their vehicles. Though these features undoubtedly make driving safer, I believe these tools are instead being used as shortcuts to the bigger issue — the overall competency of the driver.
Compare statistics from Germany, a country where residents proceed through an objectively more rigorous process to acquire a license compared to the United States. Germany, despite having the highest allowed speed limit in the world, or lack thereof, displays a significantly lower amount of traffic fatalities compared to the United States with 2,719 deaths in 2020. Now compare this to the United States where acquiring a license is rather simple and with the use of a parent-taught driving course, this makes it arguably easier to acquire a license. Most states require a teenager to hold a learner’s permit for at least six months before acquiring a provisional driver’s license. Along with this, teens are required a meager 30 hours of driving under a learner’s permit. However, no official credible way other than a parent’s signature to confirm these hours enables teenagers to shortcut these driving hours by simply lying about them. Comparably, the United States has a substantially higher traffic fatality rate with 38,824 deaths in 2020 alone. That is about a 1,327% increase compared to Germany’s statistics from the same year.
This statistic should be alarming to our government agencies, and drivers as a whole. This fact alone should have brought change a long time ago, road and written tests should become significantly harder. This change could lead to more educated drivers and safer driving environments. However, we are yet to see any major changes or restrictions to the acquisition process of a license or any increased penalty for violations regarding driver neglect or incompetency.
Opponents to this change could argue that driving plays an important role in our everyday lives, and restricting the acquisition process further would negatively impact people across the country. Although this may be true, the change would only negatively impact drivers who prove incompetency during written and road tests, effectively rooting out the problem from the source.
Though driving plays a great role in our everyday lives, drivers should constantly acknowledge the dangers of driving, and how much we further increase risks with overlooked bad habits such as cell phone usage, overspeeding and more.
