The Moment That Changes Everything: A Former FDNY EMT’s View of Teen Driving

I have seen what happens when the music stops, the phone flies from the passenger seat, and someone’s world shatters in the middle of a five-lane highway. I didn’t learn about teen driver safety in a classroom. I learned about it on the pavement of the West Side Highway, in the tunnels under New York City, on the Brooklyn Bridge during a rainstorm, and on the side of the BQE at 3 a.m.

I worked in EMS for years. Sometimes I took eight calls a day. On double shifts, it could be twice that. Many of those calls were for motor vehicle accidents. I saw everything from fender benders to fatal trauma. I carried infants out of crushed vehicles. I held the hands of teenagers who told me they had only looked away for a second. I watched plans dissolve in seconds. I watched lives change on the asphalt.

Teen driver safety isn’t an abstract issue to me. It’s a public health emergency that unfolds daily. Car crashes are still one of the leading causes of death for teenagers in the United States. Driving is often a teenager’s first taste of freedom, but it also comes with some of the highest risk. Driver’s education has to be more than a checklist. It should be an invitation into maturity, an early moment where young people realize they’re responsible for more than just themselves.

There are patterns you start to recognize when you’ve been on enough scenes. The people I treated never expected it. They were on their way to dinner, prom, a friend’s house, or work. They always thought they had time. Then a second passed. Everything was different. That’s the part people miss when they think about safe driving like it’s just a rule or a slogan. It’s really about understanding how fast a normal day can turn into the day you never forget.

One of the hardest calls I ever worked was for a 19-year-old who had rolled his Jeep on the West Side Highway. He had been drinking and was driving too fast. He came in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance. His legs were badly fractured, and his face looked like he hadn’t quite realized what had happened. He thought he would bounce back, return to his team, go back to school. I couldn’t tell him what he didn’t want to know. I also couldn’t lie to him.

Another moment that stayed with me happened early in my training. A woman was hit by a dump truck while crossing the street. Her injuries were extreme. I was still new, and I found myself doing CPR with over a hundred people watching on the street. That night, something shifted in me. I understood, in my bones, how little control we really have when someone else behind the wheel isn’t paying attention.

Teen drivers today face some intense challenges. Distractions are everywhere. Phones, music, group chats, videos it all creates a kind of background noise that turns reaction time into a guessing game. On top of that, there’s peer pressure, impulsivity, and the sheer lack of driving hours. Many teens just don’t have the experience to know how their body will respond in a crisis, or what it means when their attention drops even briefly.

As someone with ADHD, I understand what it’s like to be overstimulated behind the wheel. Driving was incredibly exciting to me. I loved it, but I also felt a healthy fear. I knew my brain processed risk differently. I could be impulsive, and I had to learn how to regulate myself while still staying fully present. That kind of insight is something we rarely offer teen drivers in formal education. We need more conversation around how neurodiversity, emotional dysregulation, and sensory overload affect decision-making behind the wheel.

What’s missing in most driver’s ed programs is the emotional and trauma-informed piece. Teenagers need to understand what it feels like when your nervous system goes into fight, flight, or freeze while you’re holding the wheel. They need language for what happens when stress floods the body or when grief makes you reckless. Teaching technique is important, but we also need to help students understand their bodies and their behavior under pressure.

There is also a side of this work people rarely talk about. It’s what happens to the ones who survive. I’ve treated young people who walked away with no visible injuries but were emotionally frozen. Some couldn’t stop shaking. Some couldn’t speak. Some had just watched their friend die. We have to stop treating crashes like isolated events. The impact of one crash lasts a lifetime. Schools and communities need better systems for helping students process what comes next.

There’s a lot we can do to improve this. Teens need to hear from first responders, not just driving instructors. They need workshops that go beyond videos and quizzes. They need to hear real stories in language that feels human. It should be normal to talk about fear, about what might happen, about how to come back from a mistake. It should also be normal to say, “I’m not in a good headspace to drive today” and have that be respected.

Families play a role too. Teens often learn to drive from parents, but not all parents are safe or attentive drivers. We should include families in this process. Host parent-teen safety nights. Have conversations about legacy driving habits and how to break patterns that don’t serve us anymore. Teach adults how to model safe behavior.

My EMS career was never about saving lives in the dramatic sense. It was about trying to meet people in the worst moments of their lives and give them a fighting chance. I entered the field because I needed to know I could take care of myself in a crisis. After my mother’s cancer diagnosis, my parents’ divorce, and the chaos of Hurricane Sandy, I wanted to be someone who could bring stability when things fell apart.

Now, as a college student at Arizona State University studying Digital Audiences, I want to use what I’ve seen to shape better education and better tools. I plan to build accessible digital content, trauma-informed safety programs, and coaching initiatives for young people who are new to driving. I want to be part of the conversation that prevents the calls I used to respond to.

The most important thing I can tell a teen driver is this: the crash doesn’t care if you’re nice, smart, or have a good GPA. It doesn’t wait until you’re ready. It comes fast, without warning, and it changes everything. But there are choices we can make now, today, that can save a life before it’s lost.