The minimum legal age for driving a car or motorbike

Some people think that the best way to improve road safety is to increase the minimum legal age for driving a car or motorbike.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Model Solution

There are several people who believe that increasing the minimum permissible age for driving motor vehicles can be an effective solution to ensure safety on roads. However, I do not agree with this statement. In this essay, I will discuss that minimum age is not the only risk factor for accidents on the road, but drinking is a more responsible factor.

First of all, driving is a skill, and age is not a factor for learning a skill. As long as the person is physically capable of handling the vehicle, he/she is as good as an adult person while driving a car or motorbike. Accidents mainly happen due to the lack of concentration while driving. For example, texting or receiving a call while driving is more hazardous while driving. A person can lose balance over the vehicle in such situations irrespective of age. There are only a handful of cases when the driver of the vehicle in case of a road accident is a minor.

Apart from that, the most number of accidents on the road are triggered by drunk driving. The minimum age for drinking is already more than the minimum age for driving in most countries. Thus, it could be deduced that more adults are causing accidents on the road compared to the number of underage drivers and riders. In this way, there is a lack of correlation between age and road accidents and increasing the minimum age for driving cars and bikes should not help much; rather, people need to be made aware of not drinking while driving.

In conclusion, increasing the minimum permissible age for driving vehicles would be less effective than preventing people from drinking and drive.