I lived in Germany for a year as an exchange student when I was 16, the age at which kids can drink without a parent present. They can't get a license until 18. The vast bulk of kids there, in my experience, seemed to figure out sane drinking well before they got behind the wheel.
Coming back to the US and going to college, I watched kids drinking at 18-19 and driving, because they were inexperienced with alcohol, and in a culture that tends to encourage binge drinking.
It'll never happen; the US simply seems culturally incapable of healthy approaches to easing kids through becoming adults on a number of dimensions.
I couldn't agree more, and numerous problems are pretty much a direct result.
I grew up in Europe. I was planning on letting my kid try a small glass of wine with food in their early teens. But doing so in the US, I actually risk jail and loss of parental custody. Let that sink in...
The US has a really unhealthy attitude towards alcohol that results in binge drinking and excess in college, and society here almost prefers it that way which is depressing.
PS - I know many parents ignore these laws, but the point remains, the law makes no exception for parental consent or at home.
This may seem kind of bizarre, and perhaps the criteria in many states need to be made clearer and more objective, but it's not an inconsistent position. In many contexts the law allows parents to expose their kids to different kinds of risks, but if the overall amount of risk is considered too high, then the parents' fitness may be questioned. In the alcohol context, a judge might consider that letting children drink at meals in their parents' presence was not unfit parenting, but knowingly allowing the children to drink every day without any supervision was.
This is true for several states.
My middle son turned 21 (legal drinking age here in the US) a couple of weeks ago. He never drank at all as a "kid." You couldn't give him a glass of wine at a holiday dinner, or a beer to watch a ball game or anything. Neither myself nor his mother were a part of his birthday celebration. I was honestly quite worried that he would be out with friends and have his first experience go horribly wrong. He has no idea how it will affect him. (Thankfully all turned out ok).
> Can an underage person possess and consume alcohol beverages on licensed premises?
> Yes. Persons under age 21 may possess and consume alcohol beverages if they are with their parents, guardians or spouses of legal drinking age; but this is at the discretion of the licensee. The licensed premise may choose to prohibit consumption and possession of alcohol beverages by underage persons.
But contrast it with Utah[1], Arizona[2], Kansas[3], North Dakota[4], Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania or Vermont.
[0] https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/APIS_State_Profile.html?...
[1] https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/APIS_State_Profile.html?...
[2] https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/APIS_State_Profile.html?...
[3] https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/APIS_State_Profile.html?...
[4] https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/APIS_State_Profile.html?...
Unfortunately this is true and applies to a broad range of subjects.
There I learned a lot of metal working including welding and operating lathes. Spent 3 years there and ended up as a certified maintenance electrician for diesel-electric locomotives (never worked in railroads after that but several skills were useful both at professional and hobby situations).
Now the laws are more aligned with the USA and that school is closed. Such laws are said to be more "protective" as if teenagers are incapable of handling sharp tools. Brazil wastes no opportunity to dumb down.
I don't think they even have shop in middle schools anymore.
Every America city I've lived it use to have amazing tram systems. They're all gone now; killed by the desire of Ford and GM to see us a car future. There is an amazing amount of advertising that trained Americans to love their cars and consider buses as the means of transport for the poor.
More walkable spaces and better community transport; removing the necessity for a car, would greatly reduce the amount of drunk driving more than fines/jail-time/campaigns. It's insane that the US drinking age is still 21 when so many of other countries, from most of Europe to Australia to Canada to Singapore, all have 18 as their drinking age.
The region is now spread far, far beyond those original borders. Only about 300k of the 2.8 million residents of greater St. Louis currently live within those limits.
The historic streetcar network cannot be replicated today precisely because, yes, we are too spread out.
Excellent examples: Melbourne and Adelaide in Australia. In fact, Adelaide is pretty spread out and suburban, but it still has a nicely laid out (if a bit dated) train network). Melbourne didn't ditch their trams and now have the largest network in the world (and they still have tons of suburbs with regional V-Lines reaching almost all of them).
If the tram networks hadn't been removed, we would have seen different priorities. Also, just because it's gone now, doesn't mean we shouldn't start fixing it. The amazing thing is when you do lay out rail, people tend to start building around them; including stores and housing. They have a an incredible impact on commerce simply by being laid down. There is a psychological impact of seeing the rails and seeing the trams pass at constant intervals that changes the way people think about transport.
I'm passionately in favor of your counterfactual. If we hadn't allowed so much low-density development, if we'd have kept and extended the streetcar lines, if we hadn't invested so much in automobile infrastructure, then we'd be in a much better position today.
But now we're faced with a confluence of factors that make getting to that counterfactual really, really hard. Those factors, collectively, are what I'm referring to when I say we're too "spread out."
"Spread out" isn't just about distance; it's about population size over a given area. It's about density, in other words.
Melbourne has 4.6M people in 3800 sq mi.
It has a tram/light rail network of over 160 miles of track on 24 separate routes, and nearly two thousand tram stops. It runs a network of nearly 500 trams, and carries 200 million passengers a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Melbourne#/media/File...
To give scale to that map, the radius of those routes (you can see something of a circle around the downtown area) from the city center averages about 15 miles (East Malvern, Box Hill, etc), and stretches near 25 miles at points.
Using your St Louis example and recognizing that certainly, not all of the Melbourne urban area is serviced by light rail, well over 700 sq mi is 'very well served'.
Yes, I agree that we should strive for higher population densities and that we shouldn't have invested so much in automobile infrastructure, but given that this is where we are, people will make rational decisions.
That's what I mean when I say that we're already too "spread out."
By the way, on the off chance anyone's interested, here's a map of those original streetcar lines:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1W809wsAmB9GR3ZvyII...
Obviously for many situations in big cities everyone can't just drive a car or you end up with terrible grid lock. Traffic problems now suggest that keeping the old trams around would probably have been better but around the time they got rid of them cars may have been truly more efficient and people lacked the foresight to save the public transit.
> https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa... "Among drivers with BAC levels of 0.08% or higher involved in fatal crashes in 2014, three out of every 10 were between 21 and 24 years of age (30%). The next two largest groups were ages 25 to 34 (29%) and 35 to 44 (24%)."
It's not unreasonable to assume the 18-20 age group would be a similarly high percent as the 21-24 currently is, if it were legal for them to be drinking.
And no it's not unreasonable at all to assume that. I am frightened enough as it is by drivers under 25, heck some of that is thinking back to 18, 20, 23 year old me driving.
Add in the availability of public transit, and you can basically always go to whatever bar you wish without driving.
Plenty of US cities have 24 hour bus service too.
In small cities and towns where walking everywhere isn't the social norm nobody does it because walking home from the bar at 2am is likely to get you bothered by the cops because it's not typical.