Making Safer Roads

It’s dark and rainy. You carefully turn onto another street, hoping you can see any oncoming cars before they get too close, but the meager light which your headlamps emit only serves to heighten your unrest. All of a sudden, you feel a crash, an impact; you fly forwards into an airbag as your ears ring sharply. You have just been crashed into by a distracted driver.

While this isn’t a real story, the message this fabricated tale carries still holds. Car crashes are an incredibly pervasive danger in our daily life. The statistics are astonishing – in 2019 alone, over 36,096 people died due to motor accidents. With fatalities and collision rates as high as the ones we have, just lowering the amount of car crashes seems like an impossible task. Luckily, we have several strategies at our disposal with which we may defend ourselves from these untimely crashes. The first and most well-known is Driver’s Education. Driver’s education is prevalent due to its immense utility: By teaching proper roadside conduct and car handling, we can effectively decrease the rates of car crashes. However, we have another tool which can augment the potency of Driver’s Education against vehicle collisions. This tool is known as situational awareness, which is often defined as awareness of and responsiveness to the context and circumstance surrounding you, and this ability allows you to detect and evade potential threats even before they become evident.

Driver’s Education is an incredibly important tool in helping to develop situational awareness. By making drivers aware that there are hundreds of cars surrounding them at all times, each with immense physical force and unknown intentions, drivers will come to recognize the need to develop an understanding and awareness of context, as well as learning to develop the habit of recognizing anomalies.

This habit of recognizing anomalies is very important when carried outside of Driver’s Education. By learning to recognize cars displaying symptoms of unusual or harmful behavior, drivers can keep themselves safe from potentially drunk, drugged, or otherwise impaired drivers. What’s more, these drivers are able to protect their fellow citizens by reporting any vehicles which could be operated by drivers who may be drugged or dangerous.

Furthermore, awareness of the needs of your car is also extremely beneficial. Much like yourself, your car has particular needs and limits. People must be taught to acknowledge their cars’ needs for maintenance, so that their car behaves appropriately when used. Furthermore, they must acknowledge their car’s limitations. They need to be aware that their car might accelerate slowly, or have little toque, or be prone to stalling. Continuing, they must be aware of their car’s quirks. All cars steer differently, and they all have different rates of acceleration. They also may have different blind spots, depending on the type of car and their mirror placement. The most important of these oddities are the cars’ stop times. Drivers must be aware of how long their car takes to stop in different environments, and that different cars break differently. They must take this into account when driving so that they can maintain adequate distance from others’ vehicles. Drivers must be taught to acknowledge the needs and limits of their cars so that they are not surprised by alterations in handling.

Continuing, some environments may require different handling of a car. For example, in rainy or icy environments, one must drive slower and give more distance for braking to prevent the car from slipping. Furthermore, cars may need special tires or tire chains when in snowy environments. Driving in the wilderness may require similar attention, as irregular clumps of leaves and sticks may damage a car which is not driven carefully. This means that people must be made aware of how different environments require different handling techniques and tools, lest they and their cars become damaged or stuck.

You can help protect others from crashes as well. While you can’t magically prevent anyone from crashing, you can report people who display erratic behavior or illegal practices, such as potentially drunk drivers. You can also report unsafe roadside objects, such as obstructions on the road and potholes. Furthermore, you can request the placement of road signs in places where such a sign is needed, thus helping to ensure that everyone is aware of what to do in a particular area. Finally, by encouraging others to drive safely and to maintain situational awareness, you can help ensure that they keep themselves safe.

In the end, cars will continue to crash, and people will continue to die due to roadside hazards and distracted driving. However, by maintaining situational awareness and by ensuring the use of safe driving practices, you can do a great deal to help reduce the amount of lives lost in crashes, both those of others and your own.