How to cut the road toll

Once again, the SMH is up in arms about P-platers running into things and killing themselves. Everyday, there is another front page article on some 18 year old that has managed to kill themself, and often a few friends. There is the usual hue and cry to "do something about it".

I don't know about you, but I think the principal cause is that young people are idiots. I was young once, and I was an idiot. I did stupid things with guns, flamable liquids, explosives, cars, heights, fire, water, tools, alcohol, bicycles, motorbikes, trucks, cats and just about anything that came to hand. That's part of being young. I was lucky - I got away with it.

The usual cure for all of this is simple - growing up.

One difference these days is that the youngsters are driving much better cars than we had to put up with. One of the things that comes with a "better" car is that it is faster. We had underpowered slugheaps that were lucky to get up to 110 going downhill with a tailwind. Every picture of a totalled car that I have seen included what seemed to be a fairly late model car that had either a reasonably powerful 4 cylinder motor or a fairly pokey 6. Commodores these days can get up to a ludicrously scarey speed in very little time at all. Cars have gotten safer, faster, more economical and less polluting, and along the way, they have created a false sense of security. I live on a corner, and the window that I am sitting in front of now looks onto that corner. I see youngsters lose it on this corner all the time - they try and take it too fast and they end up all out of shape. So far, none of them has met a car coming the other way, but that day will come, and I will be looking out the window at a head-on.

The cars that I drove as a youngster all got out of shape so quickly that one didn't have a chance to have a deadly high speed crash - one had metal bending low speed crashes that rarely resulted even in bruising.

I think the answer is to start importing Russian cars again and making them compulsory for those under 25. No more BMW's for the 19 year olds.