A privilege, not a right

A
Privilege, not a Right

Jaylin
Sanchez

My
mom and grandfather paid for a driving instructor so I can drive
around in the streets, because they knew driving around the block a
hundred times isn’t going to help me pass my actual road test. The
driving instructor told me how impressed he was by how quickly I was
learning, it got to the point where he rarely, if ever, pressed on
the brakes on his side. I passed my road test on my second try and my
family was proud of me, a lot of them told me that it took them ages
to finally pass their test and I only failed once. My grandfather
gave me his old car and now I can finally drive whenever I wanted.
One day in mid-September, I was driving home from school, still on
the high of being able to drive my own car and suddenly I see a bus
that needs to get through the alleyway I’m in. At this point I’m
too confident of my driving to pay attention to my surroundings, and
I start backing up to give the bus enough room to get through. Then
the car stops, I was so distracted with what was in front of me, I
didn’t notice what was behind me, I hit a car. I was lucky that the
person I hit was very forgiving, but he taught me something very
important that day, driving safety.

The
main reason that I crashed was because of my inexperience and
over-confidence, leading me to be distracted and not being aware of
my surroundings. Younger drivers who have obtained a driver’s
license have been shown to be over-confident in their abilities
because they passed the state’s minimum required amount of
experience to obtain a driver’s license. This causes inexperienced
drivers to take unnecessary risks, that most experienced drivers
wouldn’t take. In April 2011, The Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia Research institute, noticed that three out of four car
crashes were due to errors most commonly made by teen drivers. These
common mistakes being lack of attention to the road, speeding in bad
conditions, or being distracted while driving. These conditions can
be avoided if the inexperienced drivers chose to take drivers safety
education courses.

I
was fortunate that the car accident I experienced was not serious, no
one was hurt and the damage to both cars was minimal. But other
people are not as lucky, others can end up injured or, even killed if
they do not take suitable action. As of 2015, 3,477 deaths were
caused due to distracted driving. Those deaths were involved in 3,196
fatal accidents, which led to 391,000 injured alongside those deaths.
There would have to be 9 deaths per day to get to that many deaths,
and 1,071 injured a day in 2015, and that is just for distracted
related driving. If I knew how crucial driving safety was, I would
gladly have taken those classes.