…………….We raised the age of eligibility for a driving licence to 25 years

It is a fact of life that the 17 –21yrs. age group which accounts for 7% of all driving licences in the UK also accounts (at the time of writing) for rather more than 14% of the road traffic accidents involving injury. It is also a fact of life up against which all new young drivers come very early in their driving careers that the insurance companies do not accept that we have reached anything like normality, whatever that is, in repecct of our driving skills, until the age of 25 yrs. Now, I appreciate that we all have to learn and start somewhere but the immediate, and excuseable, gut reaction to the information given above is – get ‘em off the road! However, before you reach for your pens, keyboards or ‘phones to tell me that I’m being unreasonable and that putting up with the poor little darlings cluttering up our roads, inflating the cost of motor insurance and generally causing mayhem is just one of those things that we have to endure to make certain that the next generation becomes fully integrated into modern society let me, with acknowledgements to a certain, very fine, comedian, just say two words – there’s more!!

The number of vehicles on the road increases annually; more and more road has to be built to accommodate them and as they reach saturation these roads, like the M25, become giant outdoor (and out of town!) car-parks. Dad has a car to get him to work; if mum dooesn’t  go out to work she has a car to do the shopping, take the kids to school and whatever; as each of the children reaches the magic age of 17 yrs. that’s another car on the drive (or on the road if you haven’t a drive). With an average of 2.4 children per family that’s 4.4 cars per household until some of them start leaving home! Now I know that that is a worst case scenario in the sense that it doesn’t happen all the time everywhere at once – but it is happeing quite literally as I have described and it is a developing tendency. This country is of finite size and there is, therefore, a limit to how much new road we can build to accommodate all of these vehicles – not only when they are in use and moving but also when they are out of use and parked.. As I see it there are three possible solutions:-

(i) We keep building new roads at punitive cost and to the ruination of the environment.

(ii)We reduce the number of vehicles that are on the road simultaneously by some form of selective licensing, petrol rationing, tolls or congestion charges.

(iii) We reduce the number of drivers on the road by restricting the age limits for a licence.

Of these choices it is evident that (i) will not work as we will, in the forseeable future, run out of space on which to build such roads and, laughable as it may sound, the entire country will become a giant car-park. There are already days of the year when over vast areas of the country this virtually happens, as of now. The problem with (ii), however well it is managed, is that with the British capacity for avoiding, evading and generally getting around any regulation that is not totally absolute and completely watertight, it just would not work. With the number of necessary exceptions that there would have to be for, say, Doctors, Nurses etc etc. it would not be possible to make such regulations either absolute or watertight. They would be abused and they would fail. This brings us nicely to option (iii). Since every vehicle on the road needs a driver it necessarily follows that if the number of available drivers is reduced then the number of vehicles on the road at any given time is also reduced. Q.E.D.

The bottom line is that by increasing the lowest permissible driving age for cars from 17  to 25 yrs. the number of available drivers will be reduced by around 20%. Now that is significant.That would make a difference. Actually we could probably increase that figure to 25% and rising by also excluding the over 70s, the number of whom is increasing steadily, but we digress - that is another story. I can already hear the shouting but if road space is limited then it has to be rationed and as already described this is probably the fairest and most practicable way of doing it. It is a fact of life that no matter how much you may want something, you miss it least if you have never had it and this dictum will apply to a Driving Licence just as much as to anything else.

The procedure for bringing this situation about could be quite simple and relatively painless. On January 1st. each year, for the next eight years, the age of eligibility for a driving licence (3 &4 wheeled vehicles) would increase by one year. This would have the effect that anyone currently qualifying but not yet licensed would never be excluded by the rolling increase in age of eligibility. It would also have the effect that all of those not yet 17 yrs. old by the time of the initial increase would have to wait until they were 25 yrs. old to qualify; which would no doubt be a bit of an unfortunate shock to some – c’est la vie. To adopt any other system would not only complicate the changeover but would also complicate enforcement and make the lives of those responsible for enforcement quite unnecessarily difficult.

I have given some thought to 2 wheeled motorised vehicles and have found it difficult to reach any conclusions. The age of 16 yrs., when still at school and with hormones raging out of control, is, I would suggest, far too young in present circumstances to be let loose on the roads with a lethal weapon and accident statistics appear to confirm this view. How much this state of affairs would be improved, vis-à-vis safety in particular, by the (eventual) removal of 20% of cars as the licensing age rose I wouldn’t care to try to predict. However, my gut feeling is that the minimum age for motorcycle and scooter licences should also rise substantially although not necessarily as substantially as for cars.

If the bulk of the 16 -18 year olds are still in school and the bulk of the 18 – 20 year olds are doing their National Service (see appropriate chapter) then they are all going to be far too busy to worry about Motor Cycles or Scooters. This being the case it would seem that 20 years of age would be a good starting point for licences in this category. For the 16 – 20 year olds it’s back to the Bicycle, I’m afraid! Even this will have its benefits particularly on the 16 – 18 yrs. age group who have not yet done their National Service.. The increase in exercise will lead to a reduction in obesity and an increase in fitness amongst these youngsters, which can only be a good thing.

At 20 years old we were all a good deal more mature than we were at 16. The hormones had settled down a bit and with the suggested advent of National Service the coming generations should, hopefully, have developed a bit of self discipline. All of this would help with the accident rate as would the reduction of the number of cars on the road. Motorcycles and Scooters only take a ¼ of the parking space and a ½ to a ¼ of the useful carriageway as compared with cars and these, I would suggest, are conservative figures and that in practise they would be bettered. The figures for Bicycles are even more convincing – particularly with the growing trend (in the absence of cycleways) for them to be ridden on the pavement which takes them out of the equation altogether! I have to say that I do not see any necessity for any exceptions to the general rule. One of the great problems with British Law is its overindulgence of special cases and minorities and that is not intolerance on my part. As we shall see elsewhere in these pages, over the greater part of our system of jurisprudence we are, in fact, ruled by minorities – democracy doesn’t enter into it. It is a habit, that in the interests of fairness we really should be trying to break.

This new system, of course, would have to apply to any visting foreign nationals and this would immediately cause problems with the E.U. – except in the unlikely event that the other E.U. states were intelligent enough to follow our example! The situation is, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, that the other E. U. states do not have our space problem. Where they have any similar problem it is much more localised and there is not the same incentive, or even necessity to do anything very much about it. The only solution, from our point of view, is that the rest of the E.U. will just have to ‘go and get knotted’ and accept that it is our problem and that that is what we are going to do in our country to solve it. If it inconveniences them ever so slightly then - tough.

In addition to the obvious benefits such as reduction in accidents with the associated reduction in the use of police time, ambulance time, clearing up time, NHS time and facilities etc. – all of which could be put to more constructive use – there are, of course, other fringe benefits. Fewer drivers means fewer vehicles means less pollution, less wear on the existing roads (and therefore lower maintenance costs) as well as the already cited reduction in the necessity for new roads, reduction in CO2  emissions (greenhouse gases) with the associated help in reducing global warming. In particular for those not going on to University, who will start work later, it should introduce a tendency to find work nearer home which, hopefully, will gradually discourage the modern quite unnecessary penchant for travelling further and further to work with all of the adverse effects that that has.

There will, without a doubt, and particularly in the early days be trouble with enforcement and I am afraid that here is where we will have to start getting real with young offenders. I would refer you to the chapter on discipline and add the point that we really have got to break the habit of showing more concern for the law breaker than for those suffering the consequences of the law breaking. It is not an insoluble problem – it is more a problem of approach. Tasers, for instance, could well be used to fetch otherwise escaping riders off of motorcycles in order to facilitate apprehension.. The offender might well get hurt – even seriously, but even this is preferable to them seriously injuring an entirely innocent third party in their recklessness.. It would not have to be used often, I suspect, for the deterrent effect to start to bite.

So, there we have it; two wheeled (motorcycles and motorscooters) licences at 20 years of age and three and four wheeled licences at 25 years of age. I am sorely tempted to throw a late spanner in the works by advocating renewal every ten years subject to a fresh test – that should sort ‘em out! We test the vehicles every year - and they only do what we tell them – so why not?