A Choice

17 days ago was the last day of my driver’s education class. I took my state’s knowledge exam and received a 95 percent. In 65 days on June 18th, my 15th birthday, I will receive my learner’s permit, and I will drive a car for the first time. After a year I will be able to test for my full driver’s license, and drive by myself without any other licensed adult drivers present. Though it sounds simple, this is the biggest responsibility I have ever faced in my life. Through my actions on the road, I will hold my own life and the lives of thousands of other drivers in my hands. I, as a 16 year old child, will have complete control of a vehicle that weighs over 3000 pounds and could kill anything from a small animal to a large human in half a second. This is why it is so incredibly important that me and any other teen who takes on this responsibility understands the full impact that their actions can have. It is why it is so important that, before we even touch the steering wheel, we are informed of how potentially destructive even the smallest distraction can be. It is why I chose to write this essay, in the hopes that it will inform others like me just how big of a responsibility we have, to use the enormous tool that we have been entrusted with in a mature way that will keep ourselves and thousands of others safe on the road.

A few days into my driver’s education class, a representative from a company came to talk to the class about insurance. I was expecting a lecture on business agreements and money options that we had available, or maybe for him to deliver an in-person advertisement for his company. Instead, he spent the day talking about how to avoid ever needing to use insurance at all. He showed slide after slide with statistics about the impacts of distracted driving and how many teens become involved in crashes. Surprisingly, the part of his presentation that resonated with me the most wasn’t a number or even something that could be found on one of his preplanned slides. It was a sentence that he said in the moment as he was talking about different causes of accidents. He said every accident related to distracted driving that he had ever encountered had been a choice made before the driver ever set foot in a vehicle. He had seen choices made by teens to drive a car after drinking at a party, choices to turn on a playlist on one’s phone while driving from point A to point B, choices not to silence a phone that led to a texting chain of distractions, and even choices not to wear a seatbelt that led to many of the teen deaths in accidents that he had unfortunately encountered. Every single accident related to distracted driving in years of working for StateFarm had been the result of a choice. Every accident could have been preventable if the teen had only been informed about the dangers of driving and acted to protect their own safety. Every accident that caused injury, damage, and death to people was the result of a simple lack of understanding.

I spent two weeks in that class learning about every road rule that I could encounter from the meaning of sign colors to what direction to turn my tires should I ever find myself parked on a curb; however, in two weeks of learning about driving safety, the most meaningful things I took away came from that one day of learning about all of the ways I could hurt someone through my actions that had nothing to do with the letter of the rules of the road. The man listed obvious distractions, like driving under the influence, texting while driving, or listening to music, but he also pointed out distractions I had never even thought about like applying makeup while driving or driving with kids or pets in the car. There are so many possibilities of things that can be distracting on the road that it is not only our responsibility as teen drivers to choose not to create a distraction for ourselves but also to remove and reduce other distractions that may already be present that could put our safety or the safety of others at risk.

On the driver’s education website there is a statistic that over 32 thousand people die from car accidents each year. What the website does not include is that there are over 2 million people who are injured in accidents on average yearly. It doesn’t include that the money spent on car accidents in the US annually adds up to more than 300 billion dollars. It doesn’t talk about how a car accident, by these statistics, occurs every 13 minutes. It doesn’t tell the stories of every person who loses a limb for the rest of their life, of every child who grows up without parents, of every person who waits in a hospital for hours only to finally hear that the person they love most is gone because of a split second mistake. We all know the common causes of distracted driving, but we don’t often pay enough attention to the effects of it, and ultimately, this is what young drivers most need to know to have the courage to say no when they are faced with that choice. No teenager would risk their life by choosing not to wear a seatbelt if they knew someone who had died because of this very choice. No person would choose to text and drive if they remembered how big of a chance there was that they would be involved in an accident by doing this. Ultimately, educating young drivers about the consequences that their choices can have has so much more of an impact than reiterating what they have already been told about which choices are most likely to cause an accident, so that when the moment comes when they are faced with that choice, they have a reason why they want to say “no”.

As someone who, in just over two months, will accept the responsibility of driving for the first time, I promise to protect my safety and the safety of others by making the right choice when the time comes. I have been lucky enough to be informed about the immense risk that comes with driving at such a young age; however, many other people like me have not, and when they are faced with the same choice, they could very well lose their life. Education about what the consequences of dangerous driving are, especially for young drivers, is the singular most important issue in our nation, because we lose more people to a lack of information about this subject than we do in nearly any other area, from space exploration to fighting overseas wars. So many of these deaths are ultimately preventable, and so many of these people are young drivers who simply never understood the consequences of their choices. This is why we need to share information about reckless and distracted driving, so that every young driver is willing to make the same promise, and we never lose another innocent person because of our failure to give them a reason to make the right choice.