Name: Jerome Mina
From: Killeen, TX
Votes: 15
1 person every 12 minutes, 120 people in 24 hours, and 41,000-43,000 people in a year. These numbers represent the death tolls due to impaired driving according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Each person who tried to make it home after a long day lost their life due to someone’s ignorance and stupidity. These statistics, however, do not represent the thousands of families that suffer and mourn the loss of their loved ones. Funerals are planned every day because one uneducated person decided to get in the driver’s seat and put everyone’s life in danger. To save lives we must first identify what it means to be impaired, what types of impairments exist, and how driver education schools can make novice drivers more aware of impaired driving. Education and awareness are the first steps to saving lives.
Impairment while driving is any action or sensation around you that will, to some extent, take your attention off the road. When we think of impairment while driving, we imagine someone who drank alcohol before or while driving or who is high on drugs. However, this is impairment in its most extreme cases and it is important to recognize that most drivers on the road are impaired to some degree. Impairment would include being restrained in a cast, restricting you from having full mobility of the steering, having bright lights such as the sun impairing your vision while driving, having loud music playing while driving, which affects your ability to hear your car and other important sounds around you, talking on the phone which means that your attention is split between the road and your conversation, and being sleepy, which will lower your focus and reaction time while driving. These examples can be categorized as physical, sensory, and psychological impairment. All of these actions that may seem menial do to some affect take your attention off the road. Now some of these impairments, such as music or being on the phone are acceptable when the music is being played at a moderate volume and you are connecting your phone to the car when taking a call so your hands are fully on the wheel.
Now that we have a clear definition of impairment, and a few examples of them, we can take a look at my personal examples of impairment. When I was in middle school my English teacher told us a story about this little girl who why trying to get on the bus to go to school. She ended up slipping and somehow ended up under the wheel of the bus. Meanwhile, the bus driver was playing music and the students on the bus were having a loud conversation. Unfortunately, the bus driver didn’t see or hear the screams from nearby bystanders who tried to warn him not to drive forward, and the little girl ended up being crushed under the fully loaded 14,000-pound school bus. The scene was quickly closed down by local police and the bus driver ended up getting charged with third-degree murder. Due to a combination of impairments, of which most wouldn’t even consider impairments, a little girl died on her way to school and her parents had to see her mangled body. Parents should never have to bury their children, and reckless impaired driving can cause this. That little girl should not have had to die. When I heard that story I was roughly 12 which made me being a driver a long time away, however I knew I could not be the cause of someone’s death, so when the time came, I elected to taking a driver’s education course the moment I turned 15.
To save lives, driver education and traffic schools should hammer into the minds of their students the different kinds of impairments, and how they can affect driving. This can be done through showing videos of crash dummies when in car impact tests, dash-cam footage of accidents, and using items such as watermelons to run over to show the students the sheer weight of the vehicle they are operating. It should also be made a point to really get into the minds of students how fast they will truly be going. Highway speeds across the United States exceed 75 miles per hour, roughly the same top speed as a fully mature cheetah. Going at a mere 30 miles per hour, the impact from a standard car on a person at this speed can cause brain damage, internal bleeding, bone fractures, spinal injuries, and organ damage. New drivers must truly understand the amount of force, energy, and power the vehicles they drive have, and that they hold the power to potentially kill someone.
I personally can practice safe driving by keeping my music low, ensuring no part of my body is restricted from operating the vehicle, staying sober while driving, ensuring I have good vision, and ensuring that I have enough energy to even drive. Safe driving is a collective effort, and though many people may drive safely, it takes one unsafe and impaired person to cause a high-speed accident. I can encourage and inform all of my friends and family about the types of impairment they may not be aware of and assist them while driving by spotting potential dangers in the road.
In closing, car accidents are the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States, claiming thousands of lives and leaving families even more. We must encourage our youth to be educated on the dangers of driving, and how to avoid putting themselves in dangerous situations.
