Name: Megan Bauerle
From: Rochester, MN
Votes: 0
The best thing in
the world is having my whole family home for the holidays. No
Thanksgiving feast or snowball fight is complete without my parents
and my sister, who goes to college five hours away from our family
home. As a junior, she has dealt with the highway hassle dozens of
times since she moved away to study and knows the route by memory.
However, my sister’s good intentions to come home for my dad’s
birthday in November caused a scare when, on her trip back to school,
she scraped into the side of a bridge when swearing out of the way of
a speeding car.
She was left shaken
and sore, and her car now had three large dents to commemorate the
event. Car accidents don’t have to be fender-benders or
head-on-collisions, sometimes they are just one car against the
highway itself. Though my sister’s fast thinking avoided a crash
with the speedster behind her, she still suffered the metal against
metal blunder.
It’s important for
every drive to know that Speed Limits are not loose suggestions to go
five or ten miles faster than the printed sign. Rules of the road are
set in place to avoid dangerous situations like the one my sister was
put through. The driver behind her, swerving through the road at top
speed, should not treat the highway with the same childlike attitude
as plastic car toys, real vehicles with real people behind the wheel
are not obstacles on a course.
The hundreds of
drivers on the road with my sister need to be aware of their
surroundings as well. Her six hour drive should not be a test of
wills against how many “rest stops” she needs to take. The radio
station playing the same Top 40 hits cannot cause drivers to go into
mindless steering, and even if the road seems to go on forever, all
road trippers need to know when to take a break.
To be in the
driver’s seat, the drivers need to be balanced in their control
over their car. The twenty minutes saved from speeding through the
route or powering through breaks does not equal the hours of worry
about a scraped car, the days of repair on a wrecked truck, or the
lifetime of loss if rushed driving takes someone else’s life. To be
in the driver’s seat is to hold the power to take a trip to see
relatives, to use the network of highways to transport across the
country, and in return for the freedom the road gives, to take the
road seriously with its dangers and limitations.
