A Safer Road To Tomorrow

Driver’s Ed Essay Scholarship

Educating new and prospective drivers is imperative to reducing the number of driving-related deaths. Almost everyone has been in a car with an unsafe driver and most people may even be guilty of driving unsafely at one point or another. That it can even happen unknowingly speaks to how common it is for those on the road to disregard other’s safety while behind the wheel. Drivers absolutely need to be aware of the risks that go along with driving. Along with this education, there are several other steps we can take to make sure that the roads are substantially safer for everyone. By addressing the standards by which we educate and judge new drivers we can make the road a safer place.

New drivers are statistically more likely to be in an accident than those with more experience. Among these new drivers, teenagers are more likely to be in some sort of accident than new drivers that are older. The most obvious way to decrease these accidents is to raise the age at which one can test for their license. The human brain’s frontal lobe does not stop developing until one’s mid-20s and, in a perfect world, that is the age at which people could start testing for their license. However, more realistically, one should at the very least be a legal adult before they are allowed to drive. A lot of people may have qualms with raising the driving age, especially in rural areas where things tend to be more spread out geographically. Certain exemptions could be made for drivers starting as young as 14 as long as they meet all the requirements. These requirements include driver’s education courses, extremely conditional licenses, and employment verification. These minor licenses could have conditions that include not driving at night, not driving too far from home, and less points necessary to result in a suspension. In addition to these minor licenses, the requirements needed to get a license in general could be more stringent.

Driver’s Education should already be a mandatory class for high school students. When I was in high school, we had a very brief unit in health about the dangers of drunk driving and that was the closest we got to being educated on recognizing unsafe drivers. However, I think if Driver’s Education curriculums put a real emphasis on recognizing unsafe drivers it will reduce the number of driving-related deaths among young people and overall. This can help drivers recognize unsafe driving habits in themselves or, for those that do not drive yet, in others. Furthermore, it will prepare them for how to react in those situations and how to remove themselves safely. But there are other ways in which we improve the standards by which we educate new drivers.

To make sure that new drivers are truly educated before they get behind the wheel the actual tests that each state administer should be more thorough and comprehensive. It has been about eight years since I got my license and almost a decade since I first tested for my permit so things may have changed. Additionally, I understand that the process also varies from state to state but I am going to speak from my own experience. When I got my permit, there were about 18 questions and one only needed 15 correct to pass. 83% sounds like a pretty high bar but I did not study and passed on my first try. The permit test consisted mostly of common-sense questions such as identifying the meaning of road signs or the order of the colors in a stop light. The test did not cover any sort of real-world scenarios that might actually affect prospective drivers. This needs to be changed.

New drivers should know the signs and rules of the road but they should also know what to do in certain situations. For example, most people do not realize that when an animal runs in front of their car, they should not swerve but instead apply brakes and stick to their lane. Swerving only increases the risk to the driver and those in the car and it does not actually decrease the risk to the animal because it’s likely that they will end up running into the path of the swerved car anyway. Furthermore, many new drivers underestimate the dangers of driving in the blind spot of a tractor trailer and can often times find themselves in the oncoming path of a merging 18-wheeler. With a little education, many new drivers can learn about many easily avoidable dangers of driving around not only tractor trailers but also motorcycles. In addition to new drivers being tested on these types of safety scenarios, they should also be educated and tested on their own car’s safety. This usually gets covered on the shallowest surface level during most license tests. Usually, the examiner will instruct the examinee to turn on their headlights, turn signal, and brake lights and then to turn them off to make sure that the examinee knows they are located. However, examinees are not often tested on what to do when one of these features fails. Furthermore, I think it would be highly important for drivers to be educated on recognizing unsafe brakes. The brakes are the most important safety feature of the car and they contain a lot of separate parts including the pads, line, and even the pedal. Recognizing whether or not these parts are safe is extremely easy and can take less than 30 minutes to teach. Despite that, there are even many veteran drivers that cannot recognize when these parts are having issues. Increasing the testing standards of the permit test is a start but the actual license test should be more rigorous as well.

There are many ways to make the license test more thorough. Everything that I mentioned in the previous paragraph should be at least touched upon in permit test. But the license test should have a comprehensive written examination covering these concepts in more detail. This examination should be at least one hundred questions and take the average test-taker more than an hour to complete. Furthermore, the practical exam should be longer than a fifteen-minute drive around the block; it should be at least 50 miles of driving minimum. That should include highway driving, city driving, and rural driving in the areas where all those exist within 25 miles. Furthermore, test-takers should not be told in person whether or not they passed the exam. When these test results are given in-person, empathy or pity can be a powerful motivator for an examiner to overlook a single mistake on an exam and pass the test-taker anyway. But sometimes a single mistake can be fatal so it is important to eliminate that possibility. Instead, test-takers should be notified within a week by mail or phone. Holding our drivers to a higher standard is an extremely important step in reducing the number of driving-related deaths.

As you can see there are many steps that we can take to make the road a safer palce. But until these standards are common practice it is important that we just try to keep ourselves educated to that standard. There are things that we can do in our own life such as being aware of wildlife and other drivers. In a world that relies heavily on automobiles it is important that we treat a vehicle with the proper consideration that we should give to any potentially lethal object. Above all else we need to stay educated on road safety so that we can educate others.