Please rewrite
You wouldn’t think this was related to the war on cars, but if you look closer:
“The worst thing I saw was a car that was stolen from a nearby street and lit on fire. Then someone drove it and jumped out allowing the car to freewheel into the police barricade.”
Perhaps leaving deadly weapons just sitting on the street is a bad idea not just because of people accidentally using them to kill people but also because people can intentionally use them to kill people.
Why own a gun when knowledge of how to drive and knowledge of how to steal a car is basically the same thing, and weighs nothing and can get through any detector of any kind.
Cars and all moving vehicles with significant mass are indeed dangerous, they are capable of being deadly weapons in their own contexts… But weapons like a missile or something. You only really get one shot at using it as a flaming kinetic impactor and be witnessed.
Strap guns and exploding spears to your vehicle however, and now you can ride historic on the Fury Road many times!
Sure, now just replace every car in wherever you live with a missile launcher that has exactly one missile in it. And maybe a key lock so the wrong person can’t fire it easily.
What if you had a bunch of those, but all the keys were the same. Perhaps we can even give the keys a funny sounding name, like 1284X. Perhaps you can also keep firearms in that vehicle for an extra bit of fun.
There are any number of threads to put this in.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/how-to-get-safer-streets-minus-the-police
While I agree with the sentiment, the map graphic is at least slightly wrong. In Austria there is a program called “L17” where you can train for your test at the age of 16 and take your test as soon as you turn 17. There are some additional conditions for that such as the fact that you have to keep an additional sign at the back of your car that designates your status as an L17 driver, and you have to have driven more kilometers supervised by an instructor for an L17 than if you are getting your license when you are 18 or older.
I myself took my exam in the summer after I turned 18. But yeah, teenagers do stupid shit. I bombed my first exam. I still blame my instructor who really didn’t do a good job, but I also should have been much more engaged. And even when I got my license I was really dumb the first time I was out alone with a car and am lucky I didn’t cause an accident or got picked up by the police.
Also the data isn’t misleading but does need elaboration. There are things like how people in the 80+ range have barely more crashes per mil than 70-79 but a wildly higher fatality rate. Coupled with the general reduction in crashes per mil as increases I think that the data is not complete without a usage statistic like avg miles driven per year.
I don’t doubt that teens have a higher crash rate, age issues aside they are literally the least experienced drivers. But I want to see how many miles a teen has to drive for school, work, and leisure activities. Not only are they commuting but they are more likely to have jobs that involve consistent urban driving (as oppose to say, a trucker). My prediction is that miles driven and population density have a higher impact on crash rate than age.
That was basically my reaction to seeing that tweet yesterday. “DO IT!”
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