It’s time to punish young male drivers… but not young women

With the transport secretary concerned about rising road deaths and keen to overhaul safety laws, Sean O’Grady has an idea to target cocky boy racers

This is the time of year when, to be blunt, even more young drivers than usual – often emboldened by drink, drugs, bravado, or a lethal cocktail of all three – get in their cars with their mates and end up crashing.

We’re powerfully, movingly reminded of this by the recent case of a 19-year-old driver filmed inhaling laughing gas before he smashed his car, himself and his three friends into a tree at approximately 100mph. He was fortunate to emerge alive; his passengers were not.

The driver was sentenced to nine years in jail, which is actually some way below the maximum penalty for causing death by dangerous driving, though you may argue that even 14 years isn’t enough for what amounts to manslaughter.

And yet, the long-term trend to lower road casualties is beginning to bottom out. If modern cars were not so safe, the carnage would be even worse; and it’s worth noting that in the “laughing gas case”, the driver deliberately turned off the stability control on his BMW. The victims’ families called the driver a “cocky teenage boy” who was showing off and urged others “not to be that driver who shows such disregard for their friends’ lives”. I fear such pleas are in vain.

The story has attracted a good deal of attention, but this kind of collision is hardly unusual. The new transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, is considering stiffer penalties, and wants a new road safety strategy. Nothing wrong with that – but I wonder, believing as I do in evidence-based policy as well as the joy of driving, whether there’s a more “targeted” approach we could take.

How about banning young men – and not their female counterparts – from carrying passengers until they are perhaps old enough to know better?

Anecdotally – and if those of us who were once young men behind the wheel of a not particularly safe vehicle are being candid – we all know that boys are worse drivers than girls. Placing a 17-year-old male in charge of a machine weighing a couple of tonnes and capable of moving at, say, 140mph, is asking for trouble.

The same does not go for women. It makes perfect sense to target our attentions on the lads, who for whatever reason – testosterone, generally different levels of gendered immaturity, watching Top Gear – think they’re Max Verstappen when they borrow mum’s Fiesta and pile their mates in for a trip to the pub.

The urge to have a laugh and push things to the limit is so irresistible that the damage they do also has to be limited, given that we can’t ban them from the road completely. The pain and suffering they inflict on others is unacceptable.

So, until they are, say, 25 they can tool around in their cars… but only on their own, which might well make them less exuberant – no audience to play to.

If they want to go on a night out, fine – but in that case their girlfriends, sisters or nieces can take control, because the boys cannot be trusted to look after themselves. We all know this.

The stats back up this modest proposal for improving road safety and reducing these entirely avoidable tragedies. What the statisticians coldly describe as “KSI” incidents – killed and seriously injured – overwhelmingly involve young males.

Let’s take casualties from a collision involving at least one younger car driver between 2017 and 2022. During that time, 32 per cent of KSI casualties from a collision involving at least one younger car driver were male and between 17 and 24 years old; 17 per cent of casualties were female and between 17 and 24 years old. Young male car drivers aged 17 to 24 are four times as likely to be killed or seriously injured compared with all car drivers aged 25 or over.

I’m not sure if banning young males from carrying passengers would clash with existing equality laws, or breach the spirit of our times, but it would certainly save an awful lot of never-ending anguish for the families concerned. And it would save the lives of the cocky lads who don’t deserve to die.