Name: Noah Woods
From: York, PA
Votes: 0
An
average of 34,000 Americans die each year as a result of driving.
What can be done to reduce the number of family members dead on the
road? A possible solution is to better the education around driving.
Since education includes a broad term, I’ll break it down into two
main categories. The first being traditional and the second being
family and friends (F&F). Traditional learning includes things
such as classes, seminars, and general studying of stats, laws, and
other rules of the road. Traditional learning will help
individuals to learn what signs mean and what the laws are, but in my
experience it doesn’t much affect people’s behaviors, which is
what really leads to deaths on the road. Learning from F&F is
much more influential on a person’s driving behaviors and can lead
to more or less deaths. This is because F&F are the people that
we look up to and respect the most. We get our eating and speaking
habits from them, our general manners and mannerisms from them, and
we also get our driving habits from them. If our F&F are
aggressive and angry, or defensive and level headed, or text and
don’t wear a seat belt, this will affect people’s driving habits
more than any classroom could. That’s why good drivers ed
from F&F will most drastically reduce the number of deaths on the
road. This means that the greatest step that can be taken to reduce
the number of deaths on the road is making sure adults know the
proper way to drive so that they can directly influence young adults
behaviors in a positive way. The best way to help yourself and others
become better drivers is to support organizations who are already
bringing awareness to the dangers of reckless behaviors while
driving, and not only support them but also encourage them to target
more parents so that these parents can model good driving behaviors
to kids and teens, even before they are 16 so that safe driving
habits are just normal for them. I have never been in a car accident
or seen any of my F&F driving irresponsibly. That is the direct
reason that I drive so carefully and place such a strong emphasis on
the fact that good driving behaviors need to come from the family.
