This is an article I never thought I would be writing. There is a minor objection going around to the state licensing driving. I did not think I would ever consider it serious enough to write about.
And I am not going to in fact. I am simply going to note that licensing driving a car is a consequence of the modern penchant of licensing things. It has not one thing to do with public safety.
I have found people saying that safety is a consideration. After all, compared to horses they are much more dangerous. That is the error.
That stems from our experience from TV, movie and occasional ride on a very tame horse. The death and injury rate from the use of horses was much greater than with cars. That is the way it was.
Although we can all imagine a drunk driver or a driver that falls asleep doing a great amount of damage and even death the common wisdom is that the horse would simply do something "smart" like go home or stop. That is quite correct. A horse would likely do something like that in those circumstances.
What we do not see or think about is what horses really were like when they were the mode of transportation. Certainly we are concerned with the occasional out of control car. But who expects a ton of parked car to attack you for lighting a match?
Yet that was a common thing, one of many things, to spook a tethered horse. "Lucifers" were not lit in sight of a close horse. The risk of 600+ pounds of iron shod animal attacking it and you with hooves and methods evolved to fend off a pack of hungry wolves was very high.
Lets bring in a little more history, the Teamsters' Union in this case. Why that name? Because they drove teams of horses.
You probably don't know your gee from your haw (thus missing one of the ten questions on the WW I Army IQ test.) Can you manage a team of horses? You can not.
Not only that, it required a well earned apprenticeship to do so. And, with that well earned apprenticeship, runaway teams were a near daily event in big cities. And when that happened people in the way died. Other horses spooked and ran wild.
So what, a few broken bones, right? Lets try it this way. A person is knocked to the ground with an open wound caused by a horse right into a pile of fly infested horse manure and before antibiotics what do you think might have been the result? Prayers for a quick death rather than a slow one.
Broken bones? Setting bones is one of the few things doctors could do to help patients before modern medicine. But have a fracture pierce the skin and then that pile of horse manure and you are lucky to live.
But then, maybe you think people back then were all supermen. Just a few months ago a modern day superman, Christopher Reeves, was riding an extremely well trained horse. He is lucky to be alive and is alive only because we have invented respirators. In the horse and buggy days his injury was a death.
But let us not dwell upon the team of horses or the untended (hitched) horse, let us look at the tended horse. There is hardly a person alive who has not read the "good old days" laws for the first motorcars. They had to make all kinds of efforts to warn people with horses they were coming. How quaint.
There was a reason for those laws. Horses spooked by motorcars reared up, threw their riders. The riders were lucky not to be injured and a modern "superman" injury was certain death. And a horse with a rider would be spooked by a "lucifer" as easily as an tethered horse. It was up to the skill of the rider or teamster to control the horse.
That is the reality of horses. It was much more dangerous than operating a car. Cars do not take it into their heads to react as though their life depended upon responding to a sudden light, a loud noise or anything else unexpected.
And there was no, nada, zilch licensing of operating a horse. Yet controlling a horse required a much greater ability and experience than operating a car. That is not to say in the old days horse riding should have been restricted to those over 21. It is to say that our requirements for operating a car in matters other that physical size is way too high.
But then what is too high? In fact in most states there are provisions (for purposes of work) for getting a license at age 14. And 14 is considered no more than the age of not being a child. I have never heard of a state where a license at age 16 (learners permit a few months earlier) is not possible.
Yet we license a less dangerous activity whose accomplishment is mainly governed by physical size when we did not license the operation of the more dangerous horse. This is an artifact of our age where everything must be regulated in some manner. We were much rational in the horse and buggy days.