A Healthy Appreciation for Vehicles

Safe driving is a constant choice people have to make everytime they enter their cars and it is reinforced through our culture surrounding how we treat our vehicles. If the people around us constantly choose to passively drive and not consider what they are doing then we will also choose to do this. However, when people begin to purposely choose to be safe drivers and they understand the responsibility they hold when driving they create a safer culture around driving. This is cultivated in our homes. We need to passionately show our children, our siblings, and our peers what safe driving looks like and teach them how to appreciate their vehicles and the danger that comes with them.

I grew up in a rural mining town in Central Nevada. In our small town little stock was put into driving safety. Learning to drive in my town was essential. We lived in the middle of nowhere if you wanted to go out and do anything you needed to know how to drive. So kids learned how to drive young but never how dangerous driving can be. My first experience driving was with a four-wheeler that I got for my 10th birthday. All I was taught when I first got on was how to go and how to stop. After that, I moved on to driving my grandma’s manual car out on the back roads. Learning to drive in the Nevada desert was easy; hardley any cops, no traffic, and the speed limit never surpassed 25 mph, it was too easy. This nonchalantness surrounding the driving culture in my town resulted in a lot of unsafe practices. For example, Its common for high schoolers to take their trucks out on the backroads to do burnouts and spin donuts. Friendships in my town are created out of these desert-driving groups. Getting together to drink and recklessly drive through desert back roads as fast as possible is a common weekend event in my town. People didn’t respect the machinery they were operating, and so many people got hurt. Just this last summer, there were two groups of personal friends I have who flipped their trucks and got seriously injured. One person had to be airlifted out to a larger town to get the treatment he needed. This is a result of uneducated driving and a general dismissal of appreciation for the dangers of vehicle operation.

Educating our future drivers on safety procedures doesnt stop at the brake peddle. It also looks like creating an environment of appreciation for our vehicles and the danger we put ourselves and other into everytime we sit down in our cars. If we want future drivers to be safe, if we want the number of deaths of drivers to go down, we need to treat our vehicles as the things they are, high-powered machinery.

I took a summer job once at a mine site. I worked on haul trucks; I changed oil filters, did tire checks, and performed general upkeep to make sure the haul trucks were safe to use. When working on and sometimes within these giant haul trucks, safety was always number one. Everyone was always wearing personal protection equipement, we went through constant safety briefings, and everyone was watching out for one another. There was a safety culture that everyone maintained while on the job. Because they understood how dangerous the machinery was they were working on. Along with that, there was always constant training for new and even old employees to make sure everyone remembered how to safely work on the machinery. I believe that if we want our drivers to be safer, if we want to reduce the number of car-related deaths, we need to create a safety culture surrounding our driving culture. We should not just be teaching our students how to drive but also what happens when people choose to become complacent with their driving. We need to begin to do constant driver’s license reapplications to make sure everyone is still knowledgable of the rules of the road. If we want to change how many car deaths happen every single day then we have to change how our culture treats and respects cars.
Creating a new safety culture around how we drive and treat cars starts within our homes. I am the oldest kid in a family of five. I spent this last summer helping both my younger brother and sister start driving. It is difficult to communicate to them the dangers of driving. To them, driving feels like a new adventure, and it is. The freedom that driving gives to people is incredible. Driving opens up so many doors for people, especially people like my brother and sister who have lived in our small town their whole lives. However, with this new tool at their side comes dangers, and I try every day to communicate that to them. Making sure they understand the power they control every time they step into a vehicle is important. I think safety begins with knowledge. If you understand how dangerous a car can be to both driver and pedestrians you begin to have a better appreciation for what you are doing. And if you can appreciate the power of a vehicle, then you can understand why driving safely is important.