Fool Me Once, Hit Me Twice

I’ve only been driving for a year and two weeks, yet I’ve been involved in 2 accidents. And the funny thing is that they both happened in my high school parking lot. Within the past 6 months of having my full license, two people, both younger than me and driving on their intermediates, backed into my car. I was okay physically both times but I wasn’t okay mentally. My car is like my baby, she may be older than I am but I worked for an entire summer, saving every paycheck just so I would have the money to buy her. Not only did it hurt my car but it almost hurt the way I drive. Now when I drive, I’m constantly concerned with how close people are around me, making me a more nervous driver and often taking my focus away from the road in front of me. Being hit twice has made me anxious to be in large parking lots packed with cars. It makes me scared to be surrounded by others in the fear that I will be hit again. Now when these accidents happened, both drivers claimed the same thing, “My backup camera didn’t see you”. Now since when did we start relying on backup cameras to drive? When did we all universally agree that checking our surroundings wasn’t important? That our mirrors were irrelevant and wouldn’t help us be better drivers by eliminating our blindsides? The crazy thing about both accidents is that the people who hit me didn’t care that they had just hit someone. They didn’t care that their insurance rates were going to rise. Didn’t care that their cars were damaged. They especially didn’t care that they had hurt somebody else’s property.

Within Kentucky, teens are required to take an online driver education course which is a program aimed at helping to reduce accidents involving drivers who are between the ages of 16 and 25. This course is often a 4-hour Zoom call that teens take from the comfort of their own homes that preaches about waiting at stop lights and being mindful of their surroundings. There’s often only one instructor in a call of around 30 teenagers who don’t want to be there and often spend the time playing on their phones or doing other things to keep their minds occupied rather than listening to the important tips the instructor is sharing. To make matters worse, I have had friends tell them that their instructor gave them the answers to the quiz that they had to take at the end of the Zoom call that decided if they passed the course or not. Now when you combine the inattention to the driver’s course and the fact that teenagers love to do whatever they want and ignore the rules of having their intermediate such as only having one non-family member in the vehicle at a time with them, it makes for a dangerous combination. Teenagers these days have almost no respect for the rules of the road, making them careless drivers who are accident-prone and that’s coming from a fresh 18-year-old.

Now, I don’t believe that teenagers are the only ones to blame, the adults in our lives that impact the way we drive should also be held accountable. When I was learning to drive, I refused to drive with my dad because he used to get impatient with the way I drove, saying I was too careful and followed the rules too closely. But it’s not just the parents who are the problem, it’s the people in our driver’s facilities too. When my ex-boyfriend, a serial speeder, got his intermediate, he told me all about how the instructor said that he technically should’ve failed him but because he was a “good kid”, he passed him. I’m sorry, but since when did being a good person equal being a good driver? By passing my ex, the instructor put a lot of power and responsibility into the hands of a guy who shouldn’t have been on the road by law. Our driving instructors are supposed to teach us what is right and what is wrong, not ignoring the fact that we aren’t good enough drivers in favor of not hurting our feelings.

Overall, teens nowadays are becoming too reckless in the way we drive because we’ve never been told that what we’re doing is wrong, that we’re too dangerous to be on the roads, leading to accidents that should have been easily prevented.