@ Mintyboy - getting a driver's license in the US is extremely easy, and you can get them in most states at age 16 - I had a friend from North Dakota who got his when he was 14 - so bravo for accomplishing something that is apparently not as easy where you live. Also, congrats on getting into university, all those letters meant nothing to me but I'm happy for you :-) Where are you going to university?

@ Krellin - of course I can't make you, but out of courtesy would you mind pursuing your dirty-minded feud with Thucy in a different thread or through pm?

@ Gunfighter - I have thought that with a tandem instructor I could do it. Not sure if I would go out of my way to skydive, but if the opportunity came up I'd probably give it a go.

I jist googled it and ND's driving age is 16. Unless your friend commited fraud, there is no way he got a driver's license for operating a car at 14. The only license I have heard of 14 year olds getting are moped/motorized bicycle licenses.

It changed, Draug.

http://northdakota.areavoices.com/2011/12/28/new-teen-driving-laws-take-effect-sunday/

http://wcrecord.com/drivers-license-age-could-change-jan-2012/

What kind of morons does SD elect as legislators? 14? Really? No requirement for a certain number of hours on the road? Only 6 months on a learners permit? Holy shit! Thank God I live in a state where the laws say 16 to get a license, must take drivers ed., and must have so many hours and 6 months "practicing". You can't even get a leaner's permit here until 15 years and 6 months. And Ohio's driver exam isn't as easy as some places I guess. Even to experienced drivers, the maneuverability course is a challenge if you aren't used to backing up and knowing where the front of your car is.

I have no big problem with letting 14 year olds drive, though the standards should be high.

Since we have a growing obesity problem in the west, I think letting children drive to avoid the stress of looking too fat on a bicycle is an excellent idea.

Nah I retract that :-)

14 year olds lack the emotional maturity to handle the stress of a busy roadway. Maybe in a state whose populace is smaller than the populace of Greater Cincinnati where there only one car per 10 miles of road. But where I live, 14 getting behind the controls of 2 tons.of metal or being able to control an object capable of speeds in excess of 60 MPH is dangerous. As it is, I think 16 year olds should be prevented from.driving on streets with speeds limits over 60 MPH or driving cars with a BHP in excess of 200 (maybe set a horsepower to weight ration of say no less than 25 lbs / hp with a maximum weight of 4200 hp and maximum bhp of 208).

I was racing sprints at 14, much harder than driving a car o_O (nonetheless, I wholeheartedly agree, though moving the license age to 17 would solve a lot; it's already 16, 6 months in many places here).

Honestly, redhouse, you're halfway right. You didn't mean to be, but you kind of are.

@Draug - my kid is 14 - 15 in a couple weeks - and while a good kid whom I have a great deal of trust in, I would never consider letting her drive on her own at this point (even if she was allowed). I'll let her cook on her own, I trust her away at band camp (perhaps stupid of me...but I have no choice..), etc...great kid, good ethics, etc...but all of that has nothing to do with her ability to, as you say, handle a 2-tons of high speed metal and keep her cool if things get out of hand. I'm sure some kids can - but I think it's probably few and far between. Hell, half the adults I know don't even know how to properly merge in to traffic and act appropriately to avoid accidents, etc!

@Flemgem - sorry, but I must pursue my dirty-minded fued with Thucy when and where it occurs. It is the likes fo Thucy and Yellowjacket that started such a fued by chasing me from thread to thread in the past....far be it from me to buck the trend now.

Krellin - Never give up on a good thing, remember what makes you happy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5cZdgHV0ac

Remember, 'Love is all you need'

I think it's crazy that we let anybody drive in the first place. Two tons of metal and seventy miles per hour is one thing. Giving a human the responsibility of steering, braking, and shifting is another. Then make cars with so many parts that can easily break or wear down and trust the driver to always have functioning headlights, wipers, tires, brakes, and thousands of moving engine parts. On top of that, we let drivers talk in the phone, give them dashboard computers, Bluetooth, pop up navigation units, floating displays, cupholders so we can eat and drink while we drive, mirrors to get ready while we drive, radios to distract us from the boredom of driving, and a million other distractions from cyclists, pedestrians, billboards, animals, children in the backseat, weather, bad road conditions, etc.

On second thought, I'm starting to like redhouse's idea.

@Nigee - “Love is all you need” and indeed, Thucy is the master of some baby-luvin’…

I tend to agree for the most part with Google's CEO's comments about automobiles when they announced the self driving car project

"Schmidt noted that it’s ridiculous that humans and not computers drive cars. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense,” Schmidt said. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” Schmidt remarked."

Although as someone who grew up driving, I will admit that when self driving cars become the norm rather than the exception i will miss driving occasionally. Sometimes a sprinted drive down a country road on a summer day is quite a nice way to relax.

@bo - I was racing dirtbikes at 13 as well. The difference is racing on a track involes *everyone* moving in the same direction and no pedestrian suddenly running out in front of you, stop ligths/signs, school busses, emergency vehicles coming from any direction without warning... There is a hell of a lot more to deal with on the road than on the track. I used to race my Corvette at speeds over 160 MPH. Would I do that on the interstate during rush hour even if I didn't think a cop would get me? Fuck no! On the track, I expect the other drivers to be as prepared as me and at least aware of their surroundings and we all knwo what we do is dangerous. On the street, you can't expect that out of the other driver putting on her make up or hollering at his administrative assistant on the speaker phone or dealing with their kids in the backseat. You have trucks weighing 20 tons or more, kids running out in the street to get their ball right in front of you and more.

A 14 year old is physically prepared for track racing. Their reactions are great (better than a 40 year olds) but their responsible nature is yet to be fully developed. They think they are immortal/invicible and that nothing can happen to them out in public but statistics bear out that teen drivers are more likely to get into an accident for *many* reasons beyond mere lack of road experience and on the road, those accidents can have implications far more serious than they do on the track. You aren't going to kill a school bus full of kids because you were texting on the track...

@Draug .. first of all, I raced sprints, and second of all, I raced on a number of figure-eight tracks (as opposed to four left corners or road courses, both of which I've raced too). Figure-eight tracks are a thousand times more challenging than driving. Why? Because you're going 90 MPH and trying to avoid that person running the metaphoric stop sign for two hours straight. It's scary, and it certainly makes you prepared to drive on a road.

A fourteen-year-old is equally capable of racing as a 40-year-old, and the reason I say that is that maturity factor. Racing, especially drags and drifts, is easily the most dangerous sport that Joe Average can take on. Anyone can do it to a point (obviously professional racing is different). The thing about fourteen-year-olds is that they get into a car to race and expect to wreck or win. A 40-year-old gets in and expects to take home more money than they bet to enter, and to do that, you have to finish. Like my dad always said, the old man that drives 150 yards in the middle of the fairway scores better than the kid that drives 250 onto the adjacent fairway. Same goes for racing.

That said, in general, you're exactly right. There are rules to roads, and because many people don't follow them, it's often those that DO follow the rules that cause the danger. However, there's also the fact that you're steering, like 2WL said, between one and two tons (in my case exactly two) of metal that can kill a person before they realize what's going on. I have - well, had - a friend that was killed on his bike because someone ran a red light and hit him. They left the scene and they're in jail for manslaughter for the years to come. I know exactly who that person killed, but I don't know what his future held, nor does anyone else, and I honestly feel like that took an awesome kid, but we'll never know. That's the danger driving poses.

Still, that guy was 36. He'd been driving without incident for 15+ years since he could get a car. He'd only had a few tickets, but he was stupid once, screwed up, killed someone, and ran off. If he'd stayed, he probably wouldn't have gone to prison (he wasn't drunk), but either way, the end is the same.

@ Draug - "14 year olds lack the emotional maturity to handle the stress of a busy roadway."

Umm, you do know we're talking about North Dakota, right? I don't think "busy roadway" and "North Dakota" go in the same sentence :-)

But yeah, if you live in greater Cincinnati, 14 years old and driver's license doesn't make much sense.

14 year old distracted by texting going through school zone in North Dakota small town and blowing through the crossing guard and the kids crossing the road doesn't make much sense either.

I don't think there was such a thing as cell phones, let alone texting, when my friend got his license at 14. Most of the kids he knew already knew how to drive when they were 10 from driving tractors and pickups around the farm. And anyway, I think Semck pointed out that they changed the law, so it's kind of a moot point.

Yeah, kids have long driven really young in rural states, and I think it makes sense.

2wl, your argument might make any sense a priori. In the event, however, people do drive, and it works shockingly well the large majority of the time (a sufficient majority that people choose to do it knowing the statistics).

As for computers driving cars -- I disagree that it is a clearly preferable way, and in fact, I would oppose any car that I couldn't easily take control back from. Having worked a lot with computers, I am not impressed by magical thinking about their abilities. They fail and malfunction no less than any extremely complicated human-designed systems (something that I would think should be obvious to anybody who uses one enough to be on webdip, but anyway), and there will always be new situations that arise that require judgment calls the computer wasn't designed to handle.

So it will be a wonderful and convenient add-on for many people, but God forbid it should ever become the only option.

@ FlemGem - Yeah, it was pretty gruelling. I never believed hat people could fall asleep while still keep on walking until I saw it with my own eyes. It was indeed with full gear, as well as some platoon extras, such as MG's and other specialties such as about 100 liters of water. The preparation for such a thing was some 7 months of basic and advanced training, during which we did several forced marches starting with 6 km and ending with 60 km. The standart pace was about 4-6 kmh.
I know that right now it sounds nuts, but when your'e in the system you just do it and carry on. Today i still do long hikes such as 25-35 km for 6-10 hours but nothing like we did in the unit.
I truly hope for you that you'll find the time to get that dream of yours to come true. It is something that isn't easy at all (162 km in 25 hours is really something to remember!)
But I know that in ten years I'll still recall that forced march - but I'm likely to forget the number of games I won here in Diplomacy.

Ah the good ol' days in the Corps. Forced marches and half marathon runs at the break of dawn. A time when a simple yes was said "Yes, Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Eldridge!" Not just "Sure, whatever" or you jumped to attention when he came in the squad bay insteasd of saying "What the fuck do you want? Can't you see I'm chillin'?" I definitely *don't* miss my days in boot.

While there may be some 14 year olds who are mature enough to be aloud on the road, I believe they are probably a small minority, so by having a law to allow all 14 year olds to start learning to drive is a very risky procedure in my opinion. I drove for the first time at the age of 13, 40 mph on a country road near to my grandparents house, was a nice 10 minute journey just to give me the experience, I didn't encounter a single car along the way. While everything went smoothly, I recall being very nervous about the experience and without my parents right next to me with one hand on the wheel just in case something happened, I would have been shitting myself. And that's only 1 year before 14. So in my experience I think 14 would be far to young to be able to get a driving license.

In the UK you must be 17 to learn to drive, by this point you have finished compulsory education and most students that start learning are either studying at college to work towards a job, or A levels to work towards university.
While this may not be the case for everyone, I think by 17 most people are mature enough to be aloud to drive. I think earlier than that it's just dangerous.

@ Aureliano - the other challenging thing about the Leadville 100 race is that it's in Colorado, and the lowest elevation is about 8000 feet. Highest elevation is over 12000. I live at about 800 feet, so I imagine it's pretty hard to breathe up there, besides being a 100 mile race :-)

@ FlemGem - That sounds fantastic and really difficult to achieve. If you ever plan to visit Israel, drop me a PM. I'll show you some nice paths in the desert :-)

So far as I can tell, everybody on this thread thinks that the minimum driving age wherever they live is safe, but that you'd have to be some kind of a nutjob to think that lower could work.

I guess that's good. It's nice when people appreciate the laws where they live. : )

Depends on where you live. In Holland, 18 is perfectly fine. Everything is in walking distance, buses, trains and bicycles everywhere. In South Dakota, I guess distances are a bit larger and public transport somewhat ... less dense. Paris/London/Berlin: why even bother getting one?

@ aureliano - I'd love to visit Israel someday. As a life-long Bible reader it'd be fascinating to get to *be* in the places I've always read about. Unfortunately that kind of travel is outside my current budget, so it may be a few years.

@ Redhouse - exactly. South and North Dakota are probably similar to Holland in size, with a population of about 600,000. It's a looooooooooong way between towns.