We make jokes about lemmings. Those poor little rodents who are supposed to kill themselves by jumping off a cliff once a year. It’s all the fault of Walt Disney who faked scenes in the child-friendly documentary feature called White Wilderness. If Mickey Mouse says lemmings commit suicide, it must be true. Well, in good news for lemmings, it’s all a myth. They can all stop worrying as the migration season gets under way again early next year. The same good news cannot, however, be given to parents. Year in, year out, about 8,000 young drivers up to the age of 24 kill themselves by driving while intoxicated or full of drugs. When the police come knocking on parents’ doors, it’s usually bad news. About 50,000 young drivers are seriously injured every year, while a further 85,000 are walking wounded. This is not the fault of the police. They do their best with limited resources, but they cannot be everywhere. In most cases, all they can do is pick up the pieces and ferry the bodies off to hospital or the morgue.
However you want to approach this, there’s one undeniable truth. The behavior of the young is not influenced by the number of police officers out on patrol. Equally, the evidence shows there are no better results when states impose curfews on teen drivers, or where individual universities and colleges restrict the amount of alcohol at official functions. Young drivers consistently ignore good advice on drinking and driving. All that happens when the police do catch a drunken driver is that his or her street cred goes up. They don’t care whether the law punishes them. If the insurance companies increase the premiums and the parents won’t pay, the teens simply drive uninsured. They think it’s their right to drive regardless.
This produces two unfortunate results. Where parents feel responsible and pay the high insurance premiums for their teen drivers, this puts family budgets under strain. Unemployment is still a big threat. Foreclosure rates continue to rise. So paying these premiums often sours relationships. Second, the risk of other drivers being hit by an uninsured or underinsured teen is rising fast. When those older drivers get their car insurance quotes for uninsured/underinsured cover, they find bad news. As the risk of accidents rises, so do the premiums for everyone.
It seems teens are out of control and no one has the power to change attitudes. The only chance is to use price to encourage a change in behavior. If everyone’s premiums go up as a result of this carnage on the roads, there’s more political pressure for something to be done. If that means shutting down bars and clubs where underage drinking is allowed or drunken teens are allowed to leave and get in their cars, that’s a small price to pay. If we are to see cheap car insurance again in our lifetimes, we need to get aggressive in jailing teens who drive while intoxicated. Only when there’s a real price to pay for driving will behavior change and make life safer for everyone else.
