from the NYTIMES:

[Tuckervill]

In Arkansas, kids can get their learner's permit when they are 14.

Some people are shocked by that and some people in Arkansas want to change it. But I think it's wonderful just like I did when I was 14 and got my permit (I started driving on the back roads when I was 13, in my own car, a red '67 Beetle that I had to park on a hill and pop the clutch to get going--we also turned in pop bottles to get 50 cents worth of gas. Man, those were the days.)

Back to my point...my two adult sons, aged two years apart, got their learner's permits at the same time. One was 14, one was 16. The 16 year old had his permit for 60 days, then he got his license and could drive everywhere (I trusted him and didn't worry about him). But the 14 year old had TWO WHOLE YEARS of practice with a licensed adult before he could drive. That's why I tihnk driver's permits at 14 are still a wonderful idea.

(Both of them are safe drivers and neither have ever had an accident, although they both had their share of speeding tickets. Now they both drive slow because they are cheapskates and don't want to waste gas or pay the "stupid tax".)

And if my kids had grown up in the same kind of tiny town like I did, with no local law enforcement to speak of, I probably would have let them drive as early as I did (I first drove the Beetle with my Dad when I was 10). I can imagine lots of rural farm kids learn to drive all kinds of farm vehicles, including the pick-up truck, early ages. It's not that kids can't be safe driving--it's that most kids are learning to drive in very, very heavy traffic, with thousands of possibilities for bad happenings.

Life gets so much easier when you have a kid in the house who can drive!!!

Karen

[Imperfectstorm]

Most accidents are caused by the 18-33 yr old group, I learned that in a community policing class.

If you want justice, hire an attorney. Don't lump everyone into one narrow category.

[Deborajen]

Ageism? Sorry, I don't sympathize. With age comes experience and maturity to handle big stuff like driving. Eventually, these abilities deteriorate, too. And under age 18 (that's the age in my state, anyway) parents end up being held responsible for the under-age-18 kids' actions. If that means I'm a "bigot" for using "ageism" as an excuse for not wanting my son, or other people his age, to drive because their age is 17, so be it!

It's perfectly reasonable to have age-specific guidelines in this instance. And by the way, even attorneys can't get justice if the person being sued is legally too young to be held responsible. Better to have some common sense and statistically valid rules in the first place.

Deb

[donnambr]

A great way to avoid all accusations of ageism is to re-administer both written and road tests to all licensed drivers every 5 years without exception. Plenty of people who are not teenagers or senior citizens shouldn't be driving a car, and I have been one of them.

I'm 33 and the last time I had a driving test was when I was 15 to get my learner's permit. Michigan did not require me to take a driving test for my license because I had passed my permit test. The last time I had a written test was 10 years ago when I moved to Oregon. They did not require me to take a driving test because my Michigan license was in good standing. That's crazy! Sure, I haven't gotten into any car accidents or been pulled over for speeding since I was 19, but how the heck do they know what kind of driver I am? They sure don't know last month was the first time I drove a car in 2 years, and they definitely do not know it was because an ear tumor and subsequent recovery from the surgery to remove it gave me too many balance and depth perception problems to feel comfortable driving a car. I wasn't even up to riding a bike until 5 months ago. Those were my choices. My doctor didn't even suggest it. I know had I been driving a car during one of those dizziness/tilting spells, I could have killed someone. What if I wasn't the kind of person who always considers the consequences of my actions and who accepts my physical limitations? What a menace I would have been!

And - if you fail the road test, you should have to go to traffic school or some kind of refresher course. Thus, we finally give the automobile the respect it deserves as a deadly weapon and acknowledge that drivers are operators of a deadly weapon.

[pooks]

We went through nightmares to stop my mil from driving. She had three wrecks (fortunately, never hit anybody else -- just immovable objects) by stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake. The last time, she drove through the back of her house and did thousands of dollars worth of damage to her house AND her car.

State Farm refused to pull her insurance.

The State of Texas can't do anything unless a doctor says a person is medically incapable of driving. She was under a hematologist's care who said she couldn't write the letter because her anemia was under control and thus wasn't contributory to her driving. Her internist wouldn't write the letter. Fortunately, her cardiologist took it upon himself to write it -- after my mother-in-law giggled and told him she was still driving, and he couldn't do anything to stop her.

That didn't end the nightmare, though.

In Texas it is next to impossible to stop the elderly from driving unless they are reasonable enough to recognize when it's no longer safe. My mother only drives short distances even though she's never had a wreck. She is uncomfortable on the freeways and always gets somebody else to take her if she's going far.

There HAS to be a way to stop bad drivers of any age.

I think teenagers are allowed to drive too young. I think that should change. HOWEVER, the big difference between teenagers and the elderly is the asumption that teenagers will improve. The elderly almost without exception will not, and their driving abilities will diminish. This is a fact of life and there needs to be a legal way to deal with it.

After my mil drove through the back of her house (making excuses as to why it wasn't her fault, of course) and my husband took her keys away, it turned out she'd hidden extra keys all around her house in anticipation of such a day. She kept driving. People kept telling us all the things we should say to her, but the problem was, we'd said all those things.

When my husband said, "What if there had been a child in front of your car? What if you killed somebody?" she responded, "So be it."

How do you deal with that?

[mimitabby]

wow, Pooks, what a story!
I have a mil that needs to stop driving too. She's got alzheimers; which is really scary. She's only driving a few blocks now, to church and back, literally, but recently she got into an accident with a parked car and then forgot about it.
She's still driving..try reasoning with someone whose brain is gone!

[pooks]

Somebody has to stop her. It's that easy. And that hard.

Some people have no problem dealing with it -- taking the keys away and letting the poop hit the fan. My husband had a terrible time doing it.

My MIL has alzheimer's too. At that time it was not diagnosed and was pretty early on. Her real issue was all about independence. She loved driving, she claimed she paid for her car, she paid for the insurance, therefore nobody had the right to stop her.

When I caught her driving without a license and took the keys out of her hands, she called the police and told them that I'd stolen the keys to her car and to arrest me. (Mind you, without me she'd be up a creek, and she knows it.) But this was all about a single-minded panic at losing what she considered the last thread of her independence, and her focus narrowed down so tiny that NOTHING mattered to her but that she still be able to drive. Even other people's safety. She didn't even bother to claim nobody would get hurt. She just said she didn't care if she did hit somebody, because she'd probably be dead and wouldn't have to know about it.

And there was absolutely NOTHING we could do to stop her (unless of course my husband had been willing to take her keys and put up with the aftermath). When she had to go to take her test again (after her cardiologist wrote the state and said she shouldn't be driving) she failed the test five times (oh, the stories the testers told me, oy!) but insisted that everybody was lying because they just thought she was too old, because she knew she was a good driver. She decided they were discriminating against her because of her age, and called the DMV repeatedly, until finally I got a call from the Captain who was in charge of the place begging me to stop her from calling -- she was calling him 15-20 times a day to protest that she was a good driver and his testers were lying.

I felt like saying, "If a big guy like you with a gun and state police unit to back you up can't stop her, what am I supposed to do?"

(sigh)

[oldbikah]

My father had altzheimers and was clearly not safe to drive, but my mother would not act on it. I called the local police and was told to write to the state motor vehicle dept here in Maine. States will vary in their responses, I am sure, but they had an astonishing fast response. Within one week, they had sent a letter to him to report for a driving test. At that point, my mother just hid the keys and told him his truck would not run and that was the end of it. My name was mud for some time, but I could not let him continue until he killed someone.