US Lawmakers Consider Age Limit for Teen Drivers

The federal government, not states, soon will be setting down rules as to when teenagers will be allowed to apply for a driver’s license. This has many rather upset, and saying that once again, it’s government overstepping its bounds. Supporters though, say it will save lives.

“I’m sure there are some people who back these kinds of things that tend to believe they’re going to do something good,” Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center, told FoxNews.com. “Are the car crashes caused because Washington, D.C., wasn’t giving rules to people? I find that nearly laughable.”

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Statistics show that car crashes are the number one killer of teens in the country, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said he believes thousands of lives will be saved by creating a uniform national system of youth driving laws, called The Safe Teen and Novice Driver Uniform Protection Act or STANDUP. The bill proposed would then set nationwide standards for licensing teen drivers. Under the proposed federal guidelines, age 16 is the earliest a learner’s permit would be issued, and an unrestricted license couldn’t be issued until age 18.

And even then, if a driver has a problem with alcohol, misrepresenting his or her age, speeding, driving recklessly or not wearing a seatbelt, the unrestricted license could be held up. STANDUP’s guidelines also make it illegal for teens to drive at night, have more than one non-family passenger under the age of 21 or talk or text on a cell phone while driving. (Washington state already has the latter as law).

With the law as it is now, each state sets its own precedent, for teens to get their license. In North and South Dakotah for example, 14 year olds drive with an adult for the first six months of driving with a learner’s permit. After those six months they’re able to get a full license, meaning they don’t need an adult in the car. Four other states allow teens to drive without an adult before they turn 16, and 43 states allow it at 16.

In New Jersey, young drivers can’t hit the road until age 17. Under the proposal all states will have 3 years to bring their laws into compliance, if the federal plan were to pass. If they don’t they could lose 10% of their federal highway funding. To keep the funds incoming, the states would have to create a 3 stage program for teens; each stage consisting of supervised driving and progressively fewer driving restrictions.

Boldin disagrees with the proposal. “I think a view of history over the last hundred years where we see a greater and greater centralization of power in the United States. … This is not a positive trend. So we want to say no to all types of over reach from Washington, D.C.”

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Rep. Tim Bishop, D-N.Y., is sponsoring the STANDUP Act in the House, and says the state’s rights argument has been used against several other historic bills that have done a lot of good.

“The same arguments were raised when the federal government imposed a 0.8 percent blood alcohol limit, when the federal government imposed mandatory seatbelts, when the federal government imposed car seats,” he said. “All of those measures have proven to be very helpful in saving lives, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

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But not everyone thinks STANDUP will save lives, and some say it could actually cost lives.

Mike Males is a sociologist who studied the effects of a similar teen driving license process California enacted in the late 1990s. He said number of fatalities among 16-year-olds dropped simply because they weren’t driving. The number of fatalities among 18-19-year-olds, however, actually increased even more than the decrease among 16-year-olds. He added that age is not a significant indicator of bad driving, and that if legislators want to save lives they should focus their efforts on going after bad drivers.