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(And, for some more variation, a newspaper article:)

The facts are these: starting next spring, drivers under the age of twenty-one with a provisional license shall be marked with a sticker.

The legislation, called Kyleigh’s Law, has been in consideration for years, sometimes considering teens, and sometimes considering sex offenders, and finally New Jersey has passed a law. The new rules, for those who don’t already know, mean that the curfew for provisional licenses will be eleven, not midnight, that one passenger, not excluding siblings, will be permitted, and that holders of a learner’s permit or provisional license will be forced to put a bright sticker on any vehicle they drive. Additionally, the number of hours in driving lessons will increase to X hours.



For an English class assignment as a freshman, my class wrote an essay on whether or not sex offenders ought to have their cars marked with similar stickers, but of a different color. And overwhelming percent of the class voted no. And those were sex offenders. Here, the only crime is being a teenager.

And maybe this new legislation will keep teenagers safer. It will, undoubtedly, make it more difficult to break the rules, to be a few minutes late for curfew, or to stash two friends in the car instead of just one. But the stickers are designed to be removable, so they can be transferred when a non-provisional driver gets behind the wheel, or when the unfortunate teenager reaches the end of his first year on the road.

Besides which, driving alone, especially if driving in a strange area, as a seventeen year old girl sets comfort levels on low, especially if my car is wearing a badge that announces that I’m a seventeen year old girl driving alone. In an age where teenagers are constantly reminded to never give out their personal information on the internet, why is it okay to broadcast ages on the backs of our cars? Now the sexual predators that we’ve been so frantically warned about don’t even need a computer, or an internet connection. All they need is the side of a road and a sympathetic driver to pull over to help.

Yes, having a sticker that identifies all the other new drivers is going to make me feel safe.

The sticker can stay until a driver reaches age 21, which means a driver will have three years of being able to vote or enlist in the military, of being able to get married or work full time, without being able to drive later than eleven if his license isn’t graduated.

And if Kyleigh’s law happens to save lives, to dramatically decrease accidents in teenage driving, then all of the problems with this plan will be trifling. As it stands, however, any pros seem to be buried under the overwhelming pile of cons.