Changing Our Attitudes to Save Lives

“One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic…” It is commonly known that car accidents lead to thousands of deaths each year. NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) estimated that about 42,800 deaths occurred in 2022 alone due to traffic crashes. When an accident occurs the victim’s loved ones would mourn while the rest of the world would sympathize. And yet, when we are confronted with a commonly known fact, we hardly bat an eye. This is where driver’s education’s importance comes to light. In today’s generation, vehicles have become a part of everyday life. More and more children are growing up with some sort of automobile in their lives. This can lead to carelessness, especially in teenagers who have been driven by their parents so many times before in the past. A sense of complacency, combined with a lack of experience behind the wheel and recklessness can lead to deadly crashes. Driver’s education is not simply a center for educating you on how to drive safely, or properly, but it also shapes a driver’s mind in order to follow the safe driving techniques that were taught. Given enough experience anyone can use safe and defensive driving techniques; it’s the willingness to use the techniques that must be forged. Driver’s education not only teaches you defensive driving, or how to maintain your vehicle, but more importantly it teaches people about caution on the road.

The best way to reduce the number of deaths related to the road is through engraving caution into a driver. This can be done through defensive driving techniques, and by spreading information about the dangers of reckless driving. When I went to driver’s education, our instructor showed our class pictures of a brutal car crash that ended with a horrific death for one of the drivers. Seeing the mangled body of the driver was more than enough to get our attention and keep it in our memories. Although overly frightening a new driver would be somewhat detrimental, I believe that we should all be a little scared whenever we drive. Human beings are naturally a lot more cautious whenever we feel fear; this can lead us to be more cautious when dealing with other drivers. Fear in small doses helps us be more cautious as it forces us to make predictions in order to stay safe; in fact, our instructor specifically told us to “drive like a psychic”. There have been plenty of times I have caught myself being overly complacent. However, a specific car’s strange movement or action would snap me back to a cautious mode. For example, in a “T- shaped” intersection there was a car that could not go straight, but had no signal at all. Without stepping on the brakes, I slowed down cautiously to see how the car moves, and it just cut me off as it turned right. Another time, I was in the middle of a round-about when I saw a car rapidly approaching the entrance. I had my foot ready on the brakes due to how fast he was incoming as I wasn’t sure if he would yield or not. Once again, I was cut off. In both instances, strange activity made me feel a little fear, and thus forced me to assume the worst case scenario: a potential crash. To avoid a crash, I had to predict what moves the other driver would do and consider my options; in both cases, I had my foot ready on the brakes and observed the car’s body language.

Besides the safe driving techniques of always yielding if needed, following the speed limit, and readying your foot for the brakes, I found a few other techniques that help me avoid other people making mistakes and causing a collision. After all, using defensive driving techniques does not make you immune from other drivers’ recklessness. Driving cautiously not only means that you are prepared to drive defensively, but you must also take other people’s reckless driving into account. This is for those who are tailgating me or those who are driving trucks or other vehicles that may have a harder time turning or braking. I sometimes like to turn on my signal a little bit earlier than usual if I am being tailgated or lightly tap my brakes just so that the brake lights would flash. The vehicle behind me would usually back off, allowing some space so the collision could be avoided when I do make my turn or give a truck driver time to start using his brakes earlier. These unorthodox approaches to safer driving come from experience. Fear would help us drive cautiously at first; however, experience would help us predict strange behavior, instead of rushing into the worst-case scenario. If we are able to predict common and likely scenarios based on our location, and other people’s vehicles we can come up with our own ways to even influence others on the road to drive defensively.

Driver’s education does not have only one purpose in teaching people defensive driving techniques; they also engrave caution that ultimately reminds you to use defensive driving and to predict other driver’s behavior on the road.