In the Driver’s Seat Scholarship Essay

Brayden
Bender

February
10th, 2020

In
the Driver’s Seat Scholarship Essay

According
to the National
Highway
Traffic
Safety Administration‘s 2016 Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes report, 94
percent of car crashes are caused by human negligence and error. That
means, that out of the 34,000 people that die a year in fatal car
accidents, 31,960 of those lives can be saved if everyone
collectively drove safer. So, how do we get people to drive safer?

The
easiest answer to this is to better educate people on the dangers of
driving, but the problem with that answer is that some people don’t
listen. Some people will always say “It won’t be me” when you
show them the statistics. Although some of those people are scared of
flying in airplanes even though the average person living in the
United States has a 1 in 102 chance of dying in a car crash, compared
to a 1 in 205,552 chance of dying as a passenger on an airplane.

I
propose a different solution, a more creative solution to the problem
of unsafe driving. I propose we scare people into driving safer. When
I was a sophomore my father was driving me to school, and we drove
over some black ice at a higher than legal speeds. Us and the vehicle
flipped and landed in a ditch my father was injured and I was very
scared. To this day I am still fearful of driving faster than the
speed limit, especially in the winter. Of course, I don’t think we
should force new drivers into traumatic experiences in order to get
them to drive safer, but perhaps a frightening advertisement about
the horror of car accidents. Better yet a scary movie all about car
accidents. The movie Jaws scared people from beaches for months after
its release, if someone could make a movie like that about cars, it
might save some lives.

It
might be a little outside the box, but I think that’s exactly what
we need to get people to drive safer. The tragedy of fatal car
accidents needs to be stopped or at the minimum decreased, and all
that’s been done so far hasn’t exactly worked. So maybe, just
maybe we need to try something a little outside the box.

Citations:

Brown,
Bruce. “2016 NHTSA Fatality Report Adds to Evidence for
Self-Driving Cars.” Digital
Trends,
Digital Trends, 7 Oct. 2017,
www.https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/2016-nhtsa-fatality-report/.

Sansone
& Lauber. “Odds of Dying in a Car or Plane Crash in Missouri:
Sansone & Lauber.” Sansone
and Lauber,
19 Jan. 2020, www.missourilawyers.com/blog/fatal-car-accident-odds/.