Some people think that the best way to increase road safety is to increase the minimum legal age for driving cars and riding motorbikes. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

To begin, there is a reasonable case for believing that younger drivers pose a greater risk on the roads. To clarify, adolescents and young adults typically possess less driving experience and are more prone to risk-taking behaviour, such as speeding or using a mobile phone while driving, partly because the region of the brain responsible for assessing long-term consequences is not yet fully developed at that age. Consequently, raising the minimum age would delay the point at which the least experienced and most impulsive drivers gain access to the road, plausibly reducing the frequency of accidents caused by inexperience during those especially high-risk early years.

However, age alone is an imperfect predictor of driving competence, meaning this measure would only partially address the underlying problem. This is attributable to the fact that some older drivers who obtain a licence later in life still lack adequate skills if their training was inadequate, while some younger drivers who receive rigorous instruction can drive as safely as more experienced adults. Therefore, focusing exclusively on raising the age limit risks overlooking the quality of driver education itself, which arguably has a far more direct bearing on safety outcomes than age alone. A more effective approach would combine a modestly higher minimum age with mandatory extended training periods, supervised driving hours, and stricter testing standards for all new drivers regardless of age.

To conclude, although raising the minimum driving age could reduce accidents caused by inexperience and impulsiveness, I believe road safety would improve far more substantially if this measure were paired with rigorous, standardised driver training for every new driver.