The Highest Risk Activity We Overlook

As the statistics in the prompt indicate, driving is a high-risk and high consequence activity. I have worked in many dangerous occupations as a young adult. I have worked in the Texas oilfield around heavy equipment around pressurized lines in excess of 15,000psi. I have worked on a HazMat strike team responding to natural disasters and chemical spills that could be fatal on first contact. I have worked rope access in the arctic circle, performing inspections at heights over one hundred feet in negative twenty-degree conditions. As different as each of these jobs were, every company had the same commentary about safety: “the most dangerous thing we do is drive.”

Given the severity of risk involved in driving, the first step toward making it safer is education. I am a Class-A commercial drivers license holder and have been through advanced level motorcycle safety training. Given the requirements for both, I am likely among the highest percentile of time spent in various forms of driver’s education. In spite of that, I have never taken a course that did not open my eyes to a potential hazard that I previously ignored. Moreover, each time I receive driver training, it reminds me of what is at stake every time I get behind the wheel. I think the primary importance of driver’s education lies in those two concepts – spreading awareness of hazards and fighting complacency.

To reduce the number of driving associated deaths, I would like to see regular driver’s education adopt the approach that I have experienced with motorcycle training. In my experience, automobile education has been centered around classroom training of rules and then demonstrating the ability to operate a car successfully. Compare this with the approach taken in the motorcycle world. A large portion of the classroom training is spent discussing how different factors interact to result in an accident. Fundamentals about the physics behind motorcycles are also taught, giving the rider a more complete understanding of the tools at their disposal. In the practical training, the operation of the motorcycle is a much smaller percentage of the time spent riding. Riders are given exercises to practice the maneuvers on which they will rely when dangerous scenarios unfold on the road. Practicing for the worst case scenario and investing time in developing a high level of skill has been shown to reduce the number of first year fatalities drastically. Applying these principles to automobiles would likely have a similar outcome.

Despite my numerous hours of driving training and years of experience, I have been in two serious accidents. One of them should have resulted in a fatality. In the case of that accident, the aforementioned complacency was at play. I failed to respect the danger or getting behind the wheel when I was too sick with food poisoning. Driving in a compromised state, I briefly lost consciousness and crashed into a powerline pole at full speed. At that time, I was driving a truck for a living and I saw people making dangerous choices on the road every day, but I still allowed myself to discount the danger of driving while I was sick. The lessons that I learned in subsequent trainings would have kept me from making that decision and that accident could have been avoided.

In the wake of the previously mentioned accidents, I ended up becoming a much better driver. The improvements could be attributed to a number of different inputs but what really changed was that I understood what was at stake. After the accidents I knew how much it cost me and how much it cost other people. Perhaps most glaring, was that as bad as the outcome was, it should have been much worse. This understanding enabled me to see the value in the driver’s education in which I participated afterward. When I went through motorcycle training, I had a real and visceral connection with the scenarios from which the instructors were trying to protect us. The inclination to go through the motions and do the minimum required to receive the certification was gone. Removing that complacency should be a primary focus in driver’s education.

The number of driving fatalities each year paints a clearer picture than I can. Every person driving has, at some point, heard that it is the most dangerous thing that they do in their lives. That phrase as become a well-worn cliché, but the words are true. It is an enormous hazard, but modern living has made it unavoidable. Since the hazard is here to stay, the solution is for every driver on the road to do their part to manage the risk. Learn from others mistakes, avoid complacency, and invest in becoming a safer driver.