New York Times

It is a common refrain of some parents in New York City that the considerable burdens of raising children here — financial, logistical, emotional — are outweighed by the considerable benefits of living in a place where driving is neither necessary nor consecrated. The 17-year-old living on the Upper West Side suffers no status wounds without a car; in a sense, a dismissal of driving is its own mark of neurotic urbanity. Many of us can easily summon the names of friends — natives — who at 38 have still never bothered to get a license and, thus, depend on sisters, husbands, neighbors, in-laws to take them to Costco or Montauk.

As with so many generalizations about the city originating among the upper middle class, this one — that teenagers live at a welcome remove from car culture — begins to disintegrate once we find ourselves beyond Manhattan and the various moneyed enclaves of Brooklyn. This became tragically apparent last week, after an accident on the Southern State Parkway involving five teenage boys from Queens, four of whom had been classmates at Richmond Hill High School. All but the driver, Joseph Beer, were killed after the car lost course in Malverne, N.Y., shortly after 3:30 a.m. on Monday.

It is an odd facet of modern life that while we demand helmets for 3-year-olds riding two feet above ground on their scooters, we allow children to drive before they can vote. Mr. Beer is 17 and had only a learner’s permit, which New York State issues with various restrictions that he violated, including the requirement to have a licensed driver over 21 in the car and prohibitions on driving between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. or with more than one passenger under age 21. Whether drugs or alcohol might have been involved in the crash is not yet known, but it seems that Mr. Beer was driving a 2012 Subaru Impreza that friends and relatives of the victims told the news media he had been given by his parents for performing well academically.

As it happens, in the large Guyanese communities of Richmond Hill and neighboring Ozone Park, where Mr. Beer and his friends came of age, cars figure prominently, almost obsessively, in the lives of young people. In Queens last year, according to data from the Department of Motor Vehicles, more than one in three teenagers received a driving permit or license, higher than the rate in Brooklyn and nearly twice that in Manhattan.

When I visited Richmond Hill High School last week, several teenagers I spoke to quickly recalled other accidents involving friends and friends of friends. The current horror evoked memories, in particular, of an accident involving a group of Guyanese teenagers from South Ozone Park who ran into a guardrail on the Van Wyck Expressway five years ago. Similarly, the driver had been given the car as a gift from his parents.

This tradition is not atypical for families of modest means. As Ian Ramdas, an acquaintance of some of the victims of Monday’s accident, explained it to me, he had been a car enthusiast since at least age 14. When he graduated from John Adams High School in Ozone Park two and a half years ago, his parents, both nurses, bought him an Infiniti G37. “My car from the factory, no bragging, is $53,000 after taxes,” he told me.

“The car scene has always been big in the Guyanese community,” he continued. “These kids aren’t getting Hondas.” Mr. Ramdas, who attends Kingsborough Community College and has worked at both a flower shop and a CVS, was forever ratcheting up the impressiveness of his vehicle. “When you modify a car to your standards, you’re expressing yourself; it’s our art,” he said. “Some people invest $3,000 in a car. That’s what I paid for the rims. That’s what makes me different from everyone else.”

This area of Queens bears witness to rival car scenes: a street-racing universe and a world that calls itself Lowered Congress, which arranges meet-ups for owners to show off the enhancements they’ve made to their expensive cars. Lowered Congress cars often sit low, and members of the group advocate a mature approach to the road. At an Auto Zone on Atlantic Avenue and 112th Street, I met Lenny Raghunanan behind the cash register; he is a 20-year-old Lowered Congress zealot and accounting student who saved up enough money doing moving work in high school to buy a Mercedes-Benz C Class AMG.

The car, though, is not simply a male affliction. Across the street from Richmond Hill High School on Wednesday afternoon, I met a group of ninth-grade girls, two of them cousins who talked about the vital importance of getting rides to parties, even though Richmond Hill is served fairly well by public transportation. One girl, Kaveena Billar, also of Guyanese descent, explained that her parents had promised her a car if she did well in school.

What did she consider doing well? “A minimum of 75,” she said. “Eighty and above would be good. I want to be a lawyer.”