Summertime Accidents

It's summer on Long Island and I am enjoying it as usual albeit a little closer to home. Alas, when you pick up the paper, the daily headlines of children drowning and teens’ dying in car crashes touches every one of us completely. Early this morning a 14 yr old girl died while traveling in a car driven by an 18 yr old. Two other teenagers in the car were 14 and 15 years old. I am not sure if I am missing something but why are there 4 young people driving around in a car at 2:30 in the morning? I am the first to acknowledge that you cannot protect every child from every thing though we try. Accidents happen despite our best intentions and precautions.

Long Island is a suburb based on the automobile, public transportation, though available, is hardly reliable or convenient. Most of us have to drive to the train station and unless your endpoint is NYC or the boroughs, you are pretty stuck once you arrive at any train station on Long Island. Our automobile-based suburb is designed with maximum access to NYC with a disproportionate amount of east-west roads and trains and few express north-south roads and no north-south trains. Traveling from the north shore to the south shore is a fairly time-consuming feat and not many of my neighbors ever undertake the journey. About as far north as most people travel from the south shore is mainly to gain access to the Long Island Expressway which is squarely in the middle of the island.

Needless to say, our children have no choice but to drive if they want access to their friends. Many parents value any break from chauffeur duty especially when they have teenagers. There are many things to worry about when you have teenagers and their safety is sometimes difficult to control. Many are getting into vehicles with an inexperienced driver and multiple passengers, a recipe for disaster as the pages of Newsday so deftly illustrate. There is a reason why we have to look after our children until they are 18. And summer or no summer, they do not need to be driving around in a car full of friends at 2:30 in the morning.