Spinning

Spinning

Sometimes, the world spins around me. I’ll walk to make lunch, sit at my desk, or even lie down to sleep, and things will shift, rendering the ground beneath me unstable. Everything spins.

This vertigo is echo and souvenir of a more traumatic spinning: one month ago, just minutes into light rain, my car hydroplaned and spun on the highway, repeatedly colliding with the barrier before finally stopping, parallel but opposite to traffic. By that point, I had sustained a concussion and bruising and pressure burns on my arm. My driver’s seat had split open, the side airbag deployed; I had just avoided significant injury.

Minutes later, the same thing happened to another car, exactly where it happened to me. If I had not expected to die during my hydroplane, I certainly expected to as this second car careened toward me. But the car stopped just yards away from mine, only one rider hurt.

One month later, far from that highway, the world still spins. And whenever it does, I remember a worksheet from 10^th-grade drivers ed (DE): an image of a car, hydroplaning, swerving left and right. Nearly ten years ago, I had been taught the information I needed to prevent my accident a month ago. I had remembered the image, but forgot the fact: hydroplaning most occurs as rainfall starts, when rain mixes with oil on the road but is not yet forceful enough to wash it away.

Had I remembered, I would have driven differently that afternoon. And I’m not alone: a 2015 study found that young drivers who hadn’t taken DE got ticketed 75% more, got into fatal/injury accidents 24% more, and got into accidents 16% more than drivers who had.ⁱ Despite these statistics, over 20% of teens get licensed without taking DEⁱⁱ—only 32 states require drivers to take DE, many just for teens,ⁱⁱⁱ and in many states, DE is costly, exposing poorer drivers to greater risk.^iv

That’s to say nothing of drivers like me, who took courses years ago with no refresher. Across the US, licenses are easily and perpetually renewable without additional DE or knowledge testing (if renewal is timely). To be sure, driving improves with prolonged practice. But it also requires factual knowledge of vehicles’ interactions with their surroundings. Not mandating sustained DE or testing means we’re trusting people to remember knowledge learned or assessed thirty, forty, even fifty years ago. And not only are we trusting them to remember—we’re also trusting them with everyone else’s lives every time they get on the road.

I wish I had been required to retake a test rather than expected to remember things learned ten years ago. I wish I—and all other drivers—had been reminded of how our vehicles interact with the environment. And I wish my state had policies affirming that driving is a privilege, contingent upon adequate knowledge. That would have saved me a lot of pain—and a lot of spinning.

I can’t stop the spinning. But I can make sure that amidst it, I—and those around me—are educated enough to stay still.