Roadside crosses and flowered wreaths marking youthful traffic accidents are vying for roadside space with billboards. Parents clap their hands to their head in disbelief, and highway administrators scratch their wooden heads over these accidents, but once the emergency dust and excitement settles the problem still remains: U.S. roads are filled with incompetent drivers holding unearned licenses zooming about a dangerous and lawless road infrastructure.

Incompetent drivers by their unpredictable and excitable nature should be summarily weeded out by the driver's license test.  Accident statistics tell otherwise and simple observations show a pandemonium of teenagers zooming around in cars with enlarged muffler exhaust openings, shuttling the gas pedal and brake back and forth to the throbbing noise of Britney Spears or 50 cent. The automobile handbook's wisdom of concentrating on your driving is unfortunately drowned out by the teen mind obsessed with the 'images' and 'styles' of the latest Hollywood singing sensations.

Apply drugs, alcohol, cell phone conversations, or another rap album cd to the agitated teen mind and we are presented with a significant portion of our current roadway driving mess. Granted, the public schools don't help the confusion of teenagers, but shouldn't the driver's examination test? No, answering a few multiple choice questions, halting at a stop sign, and flicking a blinker on is about all we ask of our dumbest generation in securing a driver's license.

Then, it's off to the raceways for them after first stopping off at the music store for some more self-loathing music. There is even a web site, sttop.net, for reporting dangerous teen drivers in California. You can also read some sobering statistics concerning our dumbest generation behind the wheel at smartmotorist.com.

Plenty of non-teen drivers are part of the problem as well. The hysteria of getting from point A to Point B consumes us all and motivates us to speed excessively, tail-gate, brake-slam, and carry on animated conversations with other drivers and ourselves. Certainly, the window view does not afford a pleasant view with all of its mindless blacktop, billboards, lube joints, and quickie-marts.

In response, numerous motorists express their displeasure at such an offending view by hurling their cigarettes out the window, or simply throwing all of the day's accumulated trash out at high speed. Cigarette butts dancing and bouncing along the expressway while erupting in a shower of sparks are almost like 4th of July fireworks and a reminder of our freedom to do whatever we want.

Then we have the massive road infrastructure itself supporting an overabundance of cars and increased accident risk. Here it can be said that if you aren't on this blacktop highway of destinations driving something, whether it be the newest marketed automobile or at least a jalopy, then something is definitely wrong with you. You must be homeless, unemployed, or aimlessly bobbing about with the dregs of society.

Or perhaps by walking instead of driving you want to be reminded of your self-sufficiency, to hear a bird or two over the diesel semi downshifting, or to engage in pleasant conversation with a person passing by. The logical alternative to everyone driving a car—public transit, walking, or biking, is severely underutilized in the U.S. The desire for many people to individually drive further congests our roads causing newer constructed roads to be eventually congested and unsafe.

Many road designs are poor, contributing to driver excesses and increased accidents. For example, where roads coexist with pedestrians, road width is very important. Wider roads encourage drivers to speed and narrower roads with roadside parking slow the flow of traffic. Some newer housing developments pride themselves on smooth wide empty roads around and within areas where pedestrians frequent. However, the wider road takes the human being longer to cross and at the mercy of cars tending to go faster.

Cars and pedestrians are out of sync and at odds with one another, and cars in strife with themselves,  leading to a significantly increased risk of auto and pedestrian accidents. Our roads are getting fatter along with our dumbest generation's flabbiness. It is time to put our roads on a diet. In favor of more pedestrian oriented roadway design is Walkable Communities, Inc. who believes that "walkability is the cornerstone and key to an urban area's efficient ground transportation." (walkable.org)

Even the police stand incompetently by, hogtied by government bureaucracy, unwilling to ticket speeders and unable to arrest those drivers who blow below the minimum alcohol percentage and still get away with drinking and driving. Speed limits on most major highways are just a suggestion, allowing our emotionally unstable populace to determine their own driving speed. Driving fifteen miles over the speed limit has become acceptable on many highways throughout the U.S.

There are common sense solutions to the driving crisis. For starters, the U.S. government should declare a requirement that all law enforcement agencies will enforce the speed limit law with a 5 mile per hour buffer.

The widespread abuse of alcohol among drivers should also be met with swift enforcement, but the alcohol lobbying interests often find a champion in the government for alcohol drinking rights. To have a more properly functioning society that doesn't cater to easily avoidable human losses, only the alcohol equivalent of 1/3 or less of a beer should be allowed for drivers. But with America's fix on alcoholic abuse reaching greater heights of glorification, as in moderndrunkardmagazine.com, it remains to be seen if our legal means to drown our sorrows and then drive will be curtailed in the least.

Roadside flower memorials are a testament to people's lives being haphazardly and prematurely ripped away. For those at immediate fault for the accident, it points to the incompetence of their parents, public education and government, all of whom lend a discouraging hand to the highway war-zone confusion.

Furthering the tragedy of youthful traffic deaths is when the death experience becomes for the victim's peers just another part of their teen soap opera of ’style’ and ‘images” and ‘feelings’. So after the death ‘feelings’ wear off the exasperating children only go on to more drugs, drinking, sex, driving, and death—more confusion and a precursor to another roadside grave.

* Note: Above picture of cross and flowers commemorating Chris Durden. God bless him.