Rethinking Teen Transportation
How Important is that License?
by Pat Cunningham
March 16, 2008
An op-ed in the Palm Sunday New York Times stimulated some thinking that you might like to share in. For a couple of generations--reaching all the way back into the 1950s--one of the key rites of passage for teens has been the issuance of a driver's license. I had one when I was sixteen, and I borrowed the family car (we had only one) on several occasions in my senior year. I went along with my friends in their family cars on other occasions.
We allowed our three daughters to take driving lessons at sixteen, and even sprung for an ancient VW that they all used to go to school, shopping, and group dates. We noted a trend at that time for our girls' boyfriends not to drive. After all, car insurance was expensive enough for a girl, and about twice as dear for their young men. So our girls ended up driving them around. It seemed weird, but it kept my wife and me from having to play chauffeur.
Still, the moral hazard of putting young people with very immature frontal cortices into automobiles struck the family on more than one occasion, and the occasional collision made even a hop to HEB a scary adventure for mom and dad. After our experience, we concluded that the smartest advice we could give to our younger parent friends was to make their children wait for automotive liberty until they got out of high school. Playing driver has its difficulties, but at least it puts parents in the same region of space with their sons--and their friends--for a time each day.
Now it appears that this trend is spreading. We at Central Catholic wanted to make that a real viable option--after all, the cost of putting a teen in his own car each year (about $8,000) is equivalent to the tuition at our school. This is why we have a northeast and northwest bus route available, and why we investigated an association with a commercial firm to make that more practical. We will also give you the names and numbers of parents in your zip code to make car pooling easier to arrange.
Check out the NYT article below.
