Drunk Driving

Driver education is very important to reducing the number of deaths, whether that be getting your license for the first time as a teenager or even after. I think that there are multiple ways to fix this problem of high death rates. From improving the DMV to where it doesn’t take as long to get your driver’s license or permit, to even improving laws on where if you are charged with a DUI you are punished in a worse way by taking their license till they finish probation to understand how bad drinking and driving really is. Sometimes people understand driver education but they just don’t care and don’t follow laws anyways. In this way I think that we need to focus on renewing licenses every 5 years, since the huge gap of 12 years (varies in the states). This gap gives people the time to either forget the small things that matter to drive safely. I feel like I have a lot of experience with safe drivers as well as non safe drivers. Not only have I been driving with my license for over a year now, I also have been in the cars of my friends and family for the last 17 years I’ve been alive. I’ve been in or have had family or friends been in accidents up to 6 times. The accidents I’ve been present in were fairly minor. They mainly had to do with how close someone was following the car in from fo them. Where you’re supposed to have around 2 car lengths or 12 – 16 seconds in between you and the car in front of you. People like to believe that they have a good reaction time to press on the breaks even though they are tailgating. A few or half of the car accidents I have been present were in parking lots, where people don’t follow the speed limit. On highways and freeways everyday almost everyone speeds, although it is less safe. I believe that not following the speed limit in parking lots or residential areas are 100 times more dangerous than on these more fast paced streets. This is due to the fact of there being less space for traffic to even occur, but also pedestrians at every corner. This brings forth the danger of not only people getting injured or even killed from just them hitting each other with their cars, but them directly hitting a person who was following the laws in which they are enforced. From the graph shown on the website of DmvEdu.org, it shows how the amount of deaths have gone down by hundreds of thousands. I think this is due to the fact of better cars from the more advanced technology we have produced. It has slightly gone up in the last decade, which I believe is not from the technology that is being used by car manufacturers but from people who don’t follow the laws that were placed for a reason. A graph from responsibility.org shows that it follows the same rises and falls as the graph from the DmvEdu.org of total deaths from car accidents. The graph shows how since 1982 – 2013 it has decreased by 51% of car crashes leading to fatalities, but has risen from 2013 – 2019 by 34%. The article that is connected to the graph is from states in their headliner ‘Drunk Driving Fatalities – National Statistics’: “ Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities accounted for 32% of the total vehicle traffic fatalities in 2022.” Which shows that people are getting comfortable with the new advancement of automotive technology and are abusing it. A step I can take to become a better driver is following the law more closely to the law. This entails not speeding on the highway or freeway, stopping completely at a stop sign. I do think that most of these habits that I do on the daily basis can be used in a bad way, but if your able to still safely focus on how you’re driving I don’t think going over the speed limit on the highway for 1 – 5 mph is not the worst thing in the world. I do however think if you aren’t fully awake or aware of your surroundings you can cause a lot of trouble and damage to others. I think the way I and a lot of other people can help with this is by voicing out what safe and bad driving really is. I think not only voicing out what is good and safe driving will help, but also teaching the new people driving the correct way will also help with this. By showing them that drinking and driving is wrong, and by calling someone you have to help or even an Uber to bring you to your destination safely.