Roads of Change: A Scholar’s Perspective on Driver Education and Safety

At 15 years old, on the cusp of earning my driver’s license, I felt surprisingly confident. In contrast, my first few driving experiences were marked by this sense of impending doom. As a child, I had considered driving to be bad, dangerous, and risky. These early fears were not unfounded, created by my second-grade experience of being in a car accident caused by an irresponsible driver. This accident made me aware of the dangers of driving and gave me a sense of paranoia I thought I could never grow out of. Driver education is what showed me I could grow out of it and that I could trust myself with the responsibility of driving. 

This irresponsible driver in this story was my mom, who lost control of her car and hit a brick mailbox on the way to drop my siblings and me off at school. I was in the backseat with my two younger siblings, just getting into a nap that I would always manage to catch on the less than 15-minute drive to school. Just as I fell asleep, there was a bang, my body jolted forward, protected from flying through the windshield only by my seatbelt. My siblings were similarly shaken, but fine. It was 5 years later that I found out that she had hit that mailbox after falling asleep at the wheel, and 2 years after that I learned she had taken an excessive amount of sleeping pills just before we left the house. I cannot explain her actions that day. Maybe she thought that she would be able to get through the 30-minute drive to drop us off. Maybe she had not cared. Either way, her irresponsible driving had consequences, in wrecking her car and her relationships at home. This incident left a lasting impact on me as a child and left me convinced that irresponsible driving was inevitable in life. Driver education threw me a lifeline, helping me transform from fearing the responsibility of driving to understanding its importance. 

The heart of driver’s education is in teaching future drivers to be responsible and aware on the road. The first thing that my driving school told us was that the actions we take behind the wheel will have consequences. Every driver has an obligation to themself and others on the road to drive safely. Driver education provides a unique opportunity to instill a crucial sense of responsibility to drive safely in a streamlined environment. Driver education teaches safety by encouraging attentiveness, sound decision-making, and obeying traffic laws, but it is essential to understand the burden of why safety should be prioritized. Without teaching responsibility and how to drive safely, the annual death toll of car-related deaths would be much higher.

To reduce the number of deaths related to driving, a multifaceted approach would be best. For example, driver education has an essential role in what kind of drivers reach the road, so the first step would be to put more care into it. This would be done by re-prioritizing and creating responsible drivers who value a safety-oriented mindset in addition to the standard teaching of technical skills. By doing this driver education graduates would be better prepared to be responsible drivers by making sound decisions on the road, putting effort into being attentive while driving, and obeying traffic laws. The other angle I would emphasize focuses more on social awareness. Society has normalized irresponsible driving, in a way that desensitizes irresponsible drivers to the dangers they are bringing to the road. One way to improve this would be by implementing higher penalties for traffic violations that emphasize the repercussions of poor driving. Doing so could prove to be a powerful deterrent that makes drivers take the consequences of their actions seriously. Another way would be to encourage public awareness campaigns, which promote safe driving and increase awareness of the harm caused by being an irresponsible driver. While some people understand how to be a safe driver and why it is important, there are not enough reminders in everyday life to outweigh a status quo that reinforces irresponsible behavior. By encouraging a societal shift towards responsible driving and raising the standards of current driver education, many crashes would be prevented, and many lives saved. 

Reflecting on my own experiences, I can recognize and appreciate the transformative nature of driver education. Seeing the results of irresponsible driving early in life has now fueled my commitment to be a better and safer driver for myself and everyone that I share the road with. As part of this, I aim to promote that sense of duty in others. My friends and family who drive are also part of this two-way street, and as someone who cares for them, it is up to me to encourage responsible driving. Having open conversations about bad driving experiences and sharing a genuine concern for others’ safety are big steps that I can take toward encouraging others to prioritize safe driving, and to make the roads a safer place.