A picture is worth a thousand words.
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Which country is the obvious outlier here? Take a guess. Oh yeah, the very same one with the legal drinking age of 21, of course: the USA.
Once the envy of the world, up until early to mid-1990s, the USA made enormous progress in traffic safety overall, only to stall out and lag behind relative to the rest of the rich world, and eventually even regress on an absolute basis from 2010 onwards. Why? Because we failed to see the forest for the trees. We prioritized drivers over pedestrians, speed and convenience over safety, "bigger is better", and so on. Larger vehicles, higher speeds, and poor design of both vehicles as well as roads/streets became the norm, going in generally the opposite direction as the rest of the world. All while piddling over the usual wedge issues of things like age restrictions.
In other words, America's pharisaical culture of fear and safetyism strains out a gnat, while swallowing a camel. Move along, nothing to see here....
P.S. To anyone who says that this somehow why the USA "needs" to keep the drinking age 21, well, then, you completely missed the whole point of this article. And thus you may need your head examined.
It's good to see that Russia has made significant progress in road safety over the decades while respecting the rights and privileges of young adults in Russia. It's time to make progress on road safety of It's own.
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