Teenagers shouldn't be allowed to drive cars in highly populated areas. That's not just the message of a new AAA study, it's something we've known for at least 30 years. Since the alternative—having decent public transportation—seems to be as un-American as long lunches and universal healthcare, it's time to look for some real technological solutions that can reduce crashes and let teens be free to move about their cities.

Some stats: according to the AAA, which isn't exactly an anti-automobile group, car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among teens 16-20. They crash four times as often as adults, and putting additional teens in the car can quadruple the risk of a fatal crash. Today's new study showed that distraction played a role in almost 60 percent of moderate to severe teen crashes, much more than previously estimated.

Breaking down the study shows that the danger on our roads isn't cell phones or in-car technology, it's just teenagers. Yes, cell phones were responsible for 12 percent of distracted driving crashes. But "interacting with passengers," "singing," and "grooming," between them, were responsible for 29 percent. Kids just can't keep their eyes on the road.

This also hearkens back to an older study, one which created one of our nation's silliest rules, the 21 drinking age. Back in the 1980s, the group Mothers Against Drunk Driving saw that intoxicated teenagers were causing a disproportionate amount of havoc on the roads. So, in cooperation with the Reagan administration, they restricted drinking rather than driving.

This is very American, of course. We have a long history of Prohibition, temperance societies, and dry counties restricting drinking, and we've designed many of our cities so that if you don't drive, you're forced into poverty. That's also why there's such a constant plague of people driving with suspended licenses or repeated DUIs: without your own car, there's simply no way to survive in most of America.

Enter the Self-Driving Car

There are good arguments for responsible adults being able to control their own vehicles. But teenagers, by definition, aren't responsible adults. They're proto-adults who are growing into adult responsibilities. (Yes, once again, I know, in other societies this may not be the case, but we're talking about current-day America here.)

This is where Ford's announcement of its new Intelligent Speed Limiter, along with pedestrian detection and collision detection come in. The ISL, announced today, is a combination of existing speed-limiting and sign-reading technologies that adapts to changing speed limits on different roads.

And ultimately, it's where self-driving cars come in. Autonomous vehicles could transform society in general, as we potentially move from everyone having individual vehicles to shared pools of on-demand cars. That's a big social leap, though. For a more incremental step, we can think of them as cars that can take the wheel when friends, hormones, or alcohol get in the way of focused driving.

These safety technologies just need to get more affordable. That's where government could come in, assuring a market by mandating them as part of graduated-licensing programs, especially for the first year of driving. This could, and probably will start in Europe (where graduated licensing is much stricter), and could then spread here. Driving a car on public roads isn't an unalloyed right; there's already a level of care you need to show.

I don't think we can change teenagers. Being a kid is biological. But we could save a lot of lives if we change their cars.

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