How can reckless teenage driving be prevented?

In China, the algorithms for their version of TikTok only serve up information to young people about doing community good. I’d love it if Meta et al did a similar thing on their platforms. Unfortunately we are part of the problem as we prefer to see drama so that’s what it feeds us.

If you bring them up properly they won't go down that road at all. Pardon the Pun. 😭

What was a 16 year old doing out at that time of the night?

Total lack of parental care or control.

They should be publicly shamed on the TV and made to apologise for their sons behaviour. It won't bring anyone back but it will show we are holding people accountable and naming them.

It's to easy at the moment to have a child and not to take on the responsibility of raising them. Teaching them manners and respect etc. Finding good roles models.

Until It happens there is no chance.parents are fading quietly into the background and could even go in to have more children. So it goes on.these teens were a great advert as to why so people don't want children. It's not the be all and end all in life.

I noted the statistics to combat the assertion that things are getting worse. They are not, they are getting better.

The number has reduced from over 25,000 young men being killed or seriously injured to around 5,000. I see a reduction of 20,000 over lives being impacted as quite a success and is a testament to the work that has been put in by campaigning groups and governments to make that difference. The trend is still downward, numbers will likely continue to fall. It will never be zero, but we have to balance the needs of young people with their safety. We could bring the number to zero tomorrow by stopping anyone under the age of 25 from having a licence, that’s unrealistic. But we have to be careful with restrictions that are based on urban teenagers. Calling for a curfew might seem fine if you live in a city with great access to public transport, but that same ban stops rural youth from getting anywhere. I worked in a restaurant 15 miles away living in rural Scotland. If I couldn’t drive after 11pm, I couldn’t work. All of these things have been considered and whilst I think there is still more we can do, we are getting to the point where the balance between safety and ensuring young people have transport is harder to strike.

Ironically, the current shit show with driving tests means the current cohort of learner drivers will be the safest we’ve seen as they are having to learn for much longer than we ever did because they can’t get a test. One might think a mandatory number of learner hours would be a good thing, but again, this leaves many rural drivers at a disadvantage. Instructors are harder to find and often rural drivers come with more experience behind the wheel as there is far more opportunity for them legally to drive a vehicle on private land. I’d been driving with my dad from the age of 12. By the time I got to 17, I was already proficient in handling a car.

I’m sorry your experience of young people is scary. The ones I teach and work with are brilliant. Of course they have the confidence and hubris of youth, they think they know everything and will tell you that as often as they can. They aren’t afraid to try and fail, they are wet behind the ears yet full of optimism, knowing how they want their future to be. Is that any different to how you were when you were young? Older people back then thought we were scary too, but look at us now, running the world and denigrating young people all by ourselves! Try looking at them through the lens of the younger you, you’ll see the spark.

Being able to show parents what their child has done - all permissions are in place etc. - has saved hours of parent meetings where the parent repeatedly insists that their child would not do what multiple witnesses have seen them do.

Years ago in the school where I taught a teacher in school late for a production spotted two boys climbing into a restriced area and managed to take photos of them. On being shown the evidence the breeders called the teacher a pervert for taking photos of a child without their knowledge and actually went to the police station to report him! They got short shrift and we got chapter and verse about it because a colleague was very close to one of the police officers.

Bring them up properly that's how

Also get rid of ThickTok. I've never heard anything nice about it.

Does it ever promote helping your neighbours out or helping a charity. No didn't think so.
How it's allowed to promote arsehole things. I don't know?
We have lost it haven't we?

Well actually the parents might like that.No longer have the responsibility of caring for wayward teens

Oslo & Helsinki have achieved zero pedestrian & cyclist deaths. Driver deaths are exceedingly low too.

Until what age are the parents meant to be taking responsibility for what their offspring do?

So a responsible teenage mum. You’re unusual.

But no law can limit the power of the cars there scrotes choose to steal or how many pasengers they carry, car thieves will not be alone, where's the kudos in that?

Well they’re not going to throw the book at them before they steal the car are they?

Do you think this was an accident because they didn't realise they were on the wrong side of the road due to lack of experience?

Well that depends on whether the courts throw the book at them? But sadly with the prisons being full that’s unlikely!

In practice it doesn’t though. Sentences can be short or even suspended. Lifetime bans are rare.

There was a really awful & unbearably heartbreaking case on the A1(M) where a young baby and his aunt were killed. No lifetime ban. The bereaved mother set up a petition for lifetime bans as a result.

Research driven ‘new rules’ is just development. Some states in the US have rules about new drivers not having passengers until a certain age. This is based on sound research about how the brain develops during adolescence into adulthood- risk taking and the impact of the presence of peers. I think if it’s had an impact on accidents then that’s a sensible approach and not at all knee jerk.

TBH I doubt that the sort of reckless boys/young men, who think it’s fun to drive cars (their own or stolen) the wrong way down motorways at 100 mph, will take a blind bit of notice of any rules at all. I dare say a lot of the ‘fun’ is doing anything that’s illegal or otherwise disapproved of.

@teaandtoastwithmarmite “People speed all the time.”

Exactly! Reckless driving exists and it’s not just teens who do it.

It’s one of the safest in the world. Only Norway and Sweden have fewer deaths. We’re not comparing to low income countries we’re comparing to everywhere

I think this is the nub of the matter.

We live in a world where reckless and dangerous and criminal behaviour is often seen to be rewarded across all classes, whether it's leniency for otherwise "good and upstanding" members of society - who often aren't, they're just well connected or have enough money to buy their way out of it.

Online platforms are now seen as a legitimate income stream with the impulsive devising ever more reckless ways to generate views and monetary reward, because "the world of work" has changed so much - I think this is a big factor. There is also a real danger of people losing their grip on reality and humanity because AI is warping the notion of our existence into something soulless.

Influencers like bloody Tate and Peterson are devaluing women and their influence; mothers don't matter, and if a father is absent in material reality or at home but not involved in backing up his wife's parenting, it falls to schools to try and plug the gap with little practical consistency.

I'm 57. My DS is 32 and although bright and capable, it was an uphill battle getting him through his teenage years with one or two hairy near misses with authority mostly due to peer pressure. He's stable now, working etc, and most of his peer group are ok despite being from mostly average and in some cases below back grounds.

The biggest change from my own observation in how kids are now are in economic terms and via social media.

I think it's going to get worse because we are human beings expected to integrate with technology at a speed we're not psychologically geared up for. Nothing about life is simple. The opining about resilience and adaptability to survive seems to be eroding the capacity for genuine empathy and understanding or critical thinking in terms of consequences of actions.

These crashes and deaths, especially the two policemen just boggle my mind. Being the driver who caused this, and those complicit in accompanying them, at, I believe, 23 with zero thought or care for anyone else is just something I can't get my head round. Did they think they were in GTA and would just respawn? Were they on drugs?

Honestly, I have lived with hope for our future because apparently nihilism is frowned upon, but I'm really struggling today, and both can and can't understand it from the bigger picture perspective.

What is to be done about it is a whole other question.

How does that affect unlicensed drivers in stolen cars?

The knee-jerk “MORE ROOLZ!” approach will not help: all it does is make driving more difficult and expensive for responsible young drivers, and makes them dependent on their parents for even longer. No rules would have stopped these lads. The reckless drivers break the rules knowing that they are unlikely to be caught and prosecuted, and some of them just pay the teeny-tiny fines and carry on as before. Until some way can be found to physically prevent people driving illegally, this is very difficult to enforce.

It needs to be more enforcement of existing laws: not just for teenagers, but adults as well. Police out there, fines of tens of thousands, not merely hundreds. I would be in favour all disqualification offences carrying a suspended sentence, so that the penalty for driving when disqualified is prison, but that’s not going to happen while the prisons are full. (And even then, prison is of highly dubious value for teenagers. The only thing it does is keep them off the road for a while, to educate them in crime from the professionals.)

I think the suggestion that it is only a young criminal underclass who are driving dangerously is a myth, largely peddled by those nice, middle class parents who think their dear Sebastian wouldn’t possibly do such a thing in his brand new Ford Fiesta. When actually the statistics show that most accidents happen in rural/suburban areas by young men who own their own cars and those two things are most likely to mean they are from a middle class family.

The myth also invites us to look down our noses and “other” groups of young men (just as the OP is leading people to do) rather than accept we might be part of the problem.

It does feel nice to compare to developing countries when it comes to road travel. I’ll give GB that. There are still many countries without any “standards”, it’s very unsafe.

Could make a speed awareness course part of the test.
Could do speed awareness courses in schools.
Could stop calling kids ridiculous names as it's usually those kids.

do you think the bar is so low due to this one accident though? No one was talking about teenage reckless driving 6 months ago