In just one week, I saw a dog lying in the road after having been struck by a car, and had a colleague hit head-on by a teenage driver as she drove to my house. Both accidents were on West Mercer Way, a residential street with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour.

Today I was mentally composing this letter and trimming some brush around our neighborhood mailboxes when a laughing teenage boy in a silver SUV intentionally drove over a traffic cone we’d placed along the road since my wife and I were working with our 6-year-old daughter. I write as a parent to ask all Islanders, and especially parents of young drivers, to remember that driving a two-ton hunk of steel with several hundred times the power of our own bodies requires caution and responsibility.

Peter Mostow