Scouts who drive

[nolesrule 58]

Actually, the full statement was

 

"in many states, if he is 16 or 17, then he can't have any passengers (except for parent, guardian or trainer), or be driving at night."

 

In my observation, the 16 or 17 part of the statement overwhelmingly correlates with the intermediate licenses, so I'd say it is a valid generalization.

 

Secondly, the statement wasn't restricted to passengers, but also about nighttime driving.

 

Thirdly, as boomerscout points out, lets not confuse the meanings of "most" and "many".

 

Finally, with at least 40 states having some kind of restriction on passengers OR nighttime driving (I did not do any correlation to determine and either/or total, so it might be 40, might be more), I'd suggest that a minimum of 80% would qualify as both "many" AND "most".

[Lisabob 13]

~rolling my eyes~ Beavah, let us not get overly pedantic here. I have not spent a whole lot of time investigating how the data was collected and it could be that there are various selection bias issues, I truly do not know. Nor am I going to spend time, today, ferreting this out. But it isn't just the "young" part - it is the "young + inexperienced" part that leads people to hypothesize a particularly important connection between young drivers and distractions from additional passengers. This could be (might be/might not be, but could be) different from the distracting impact of additional passengers on a more experienced driver, and/or on a more experienced and older driver with better developed risk awareness and judgment in life, generally speaking. Is that a bias on my part against the young? Too bad. Reality is that we restrict people from all sorts of things based on age in this society.

 

Anyway the more general point is that there are limits on young drivers in place in many locales. These limits might actually conflict with the timing of scouting events, or the practicalities of traveling as a larger group with lots of cars.

 

My first take is that how a scout gets to and from a weekly troop meeting is not the scout leaders' concern; it is the parents' concern. My second take is that how scouts get to events where the troop is arranging transportation, becomes somewhat the troop's concern, and there might be a bunch of practical reasons why troops would decline to encourage young drivers from driving - even if the scout is driving him or her self.

[Troop24 12]

"Hopefully this thread will still not be active when he does."

 

Come on, Ed. It would be great to keep this thread alive for the next 10 or 11 years to see if Beavah's predictions come true about the rest of us becoming more restricted in our driving! Maybe Fish's son will have to drive us around instead.

[Scoutfish 16]

Troop24....as long as it's not with my gas!