There are People in the Cars

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Buckle up, it’s the law. The suspense won’t kill you; texting might.

All of these have been shown across a billboard at some point; with photos of car crashes, with stick figures or little drawings of someone texting while driving. These are the kinds of phrases I would read when I was first learning how to read, when driving meant something Mom and Dad and grown-ups did to get somewhere fast, when being in a car meant sitting in the back seat and looking out the window at passing cars and billboards.

I did not grow up in a walkable place; everyone had a car, and if someone didn’t have a car, they would have to find someone who did. It was something my parents complained about a lot; “This city means too much driving!” Growing up where everyone had a car meant that I grew up with every major street having at least one metal-pole-with-a-shiny-white-sign roadside memorial jutting out of the ground. On the corners where people waited for the light to turn, on bends that someone took too fast, on long stretches of straight road that shouldn’t have needed a memorial. I was young staring at these, thinking that a car must be that dangerous, that driving must be that dangerous. It made me scared to turn sixteen and be behind the wheel of something that could take a life.

A car can be a weapon. A car is a vehicle. A vehicle is driven. The driver turns a vehicle into a weapon. My perspective shifted like this when I became a teenager, when people started drinking and bragging about it, when they laughed over the thrill of not being caught or being caught and let back onto the road because they acted sober enough. They talked like driving drunk made things more exciting, like it was a life achievement everyone got at some point. People around me talked like this, but on television, people took the bus or they walked home or they had a sober driver. It made me wonder that if everyone didn’t have a car, maybe safety would play a larger part. No money to buy a new car? Don’t risk wrecking the old one.

This logic made me reevaluate my nonwalkable city and the price it forced on its tenants. There was a bus system, but it was notoriously bad at being on time. The automated train system only extended to the fringes of downtown, fringes that barely scratched at the sheer size of the city. The transportation forced us to drive to the point that it stopped being something serious, stopped being something with laws that needed to be followed. It became something people would fall back on even when they were dangerous. It harmed my community because it stopped letting us see each other as people and turned every other car on the road into something that wasn’t going fast enough when the light turned green.

My brother was rear-ended that way. He, my sister and I were on the way to our weekly piano lessons. The light turned red, he braked and we waited for it to turn green; I sat in the middle seat in the back of the car. There were five cars in front of us, the line about the same on either lane beside us. We waited. The light didn’t change, then— my head was forced forward, the sudden whip of my neck sending sharp pain as the back of our Saturn— The car that I at ten was hoping to drive at sixteen— was crushed. I saw the car that hit us shoot out from behind us, probably after reversing, to shove between two cars in the right line and speed into the parking lot of a Taco Bell, to get away at high speeds. None of us caught the plate number, our car was totaled, and we missed piano that week. And that was a “good” crash. No one got hurt. We got lucky, even if we were unlucky.

I think about that crash a lot when I drive. It was the only one I’ve been in, but the Taco Bell it happened at is close to my house, and now when anyone in my family gets in a car crash, they refuse to let the other car leave before information is exchanged. I think for obvious insurance reasons, that’s a good thing, but I think it also forces the other driver to be accountable, to acknowledge that the day of another person has been altered for the worse.

I think the lack of acknowledgment is what makes people think it’s okay to drive drunk, to not make their kids wear seatbelts, or not pull over for ambulances. Because they want to believe they’re the only ones on the road, that they are somehow the best driver in the world, or that the other cars are just there to get in their way. I think when we force people to realize that they hurt people or can hurt people, it keeps them from doing it again.

I see those billboards still. Sometimes I laugh, because they made a good pun or because the drawing is just really bad. But I always read them, because they remind me I’m not alone on the road. They remind me that the car isn’t dangerous.

The driver is.