Reaction Time

It was a busy night on the main road with blinding lights. Like my mother, I had been cursed with “night blindness,” something individual wishes not to have when behind the wheel. Per my driving instructors requirements, I needed to have a minimum of 10 hours of driving at night. Needless to say, it wasn’t always easy.

One night while practising night driving with my mother, we decided to get practice on the main road. I felt I wasn’t ready, but then again, who is? As we were approaching an intersection with 5 different roadways, I began to get confused, having difficulty reading signs and seeing arrows. With so many lights reflecting, I found it hard to adjust. When I signalled into a turn lane, I noticed there were two of them. It was a busy road, so I just assumed they were going in the same direction.

I learned something new that day.

As the light turned green, I went and began to turn my wheel like the cars next to me. My mother panicked, cars were screaming, and before I could process anything, I felt a jerk of the steering wheel.

“Pull over now!” My mother yelled.

I saw a dollar store and signalled to pull in, only for my mother to shout at me again about how I was going into a dip too fast. But when I pulled into the empty parking lot and turned off the car, she began to hyperventilate and then screamed— I can’t recall the last time she did that. The next five minutes were a blur as I tried not to cry from all the scolding I was getting. Eventually, her lecture ceased and the car was quiet.

“Get back on the road,” she told me.

I looked at her in bewilderment, surprised she even wanted to have me drive her again. But then I turned the car back on and pulled out of the parking lot. While driving home, I restrained myself from crying, knowing it would impair my vision more than it already was.

I learned I wasn’t afraid of death.

After that experience, I was always hyper-focused on not harming others, but not once did I consider myself nor those who are with me. It wasn’t until after that event that I reconsidered my priorities. Not only did I need to practice road safety, but I also needed to have a grasp of everything around me. I realized that I had to learn the roads so well to the point I could drive impaired in case lights blinded me. If all I did was take a driving test, pass, and receive my license, who knows how many people would’ve been injured. I would never know how unprepared I would be. How quick I must act.

Along with this, I want to propose not necessarily a solution, but an addition in an effort to provide safer roads. Countless times I’ve seen potential accidents occur due to slow reaction time, and it’s no doubt that the older a person gets, the slower their reaction time is. So, to test how quickly a person could react in a potential crash situation, I believe there should be a reaction-time test for all drivers (and soon to be drivers) that need to renew their license. The test is uncostly and a simple way of determining how fast an individual processes something. All that would need to be done is to hold a ruler in front of the testee and let go at random. After repeating this another two-ish times and calculating the average based on what number they grabbed on the ruler, it can be determined how fast a person’s reaction time is. This same process was tested on me two years ago. After I volunteered to be a test subject, my physics teacher dropped a ruler at random for me to grab. He looked at the measurement that I grabbed and audibly noted how I had a pretty quick reaction time. The only downside with this test is that it doesn’t account for possible impairments. Along with that, this test only measures a person’s reaction time when focused on a singular object— unlike driving which requires multitasking. Other than that, this seems like a suitable way to see if a person is prepared for quick-thinking.

With the help of my mom and drivers ed teacher, I learned the fundamentals of being a driver along with what it took and the amount of responsibility it possessed. And possibly the only way to ensure that deaths from car-related accidents are kept to a minimum is to make sure future (and present) drivers are made aware of the amount of power they hold in a single contraption. Nothing can prevent human error, but we can prepare for it. After all, practice makes some-what perfect.