One Wrong Move

Laconia, New Hampshire. It’s a small town in the northern part of New Hampshire. I have spent most of my life here, from age 11 to 17 years old. I have a younger sister who’s only 14, she has been here her entire childhood. 16,871 is the population of residents in Laconia as of 2021. Before that Laconia was actually classified as a village. That is how confined it is, so I’m sure it’s easy to see that the community is tight knit. We moved her in 2018. There were 9 fatal car accidents in our small town that year. The year before that there were 16. in 2016 there were 11, the year before there were 17. 17 fatal car accidents in a town whose population is just short of a village. So what’s that to say about a city like Los Angeles. In 2015, there were an estimated 52,000 car accidents in LA. In 2016, the number of traffic accidents in Los Angeles went up by nearly 20 percent to 55,350. That means that an average of one person is killed in Los Angeles traffic accidents every 40 hours. Every 40 hours a person dies because people are under-educated when it comes to driving. 55,000 car accidents in one place in a single year. These statistics were released 7 years ago, who knows how bad it is now.

So we must ask ourselves, what steps must be taken in order for people to be more safe on the road. Driver Education is more important than ever right now. But it is quite costly and even if you have the money for it you may not have a vehicle just yet as a young 16 or 17 year old kid. So why pay for a class when you could just wait a couple years right? Wrong. Driver Education is detrimental in becoming a safe driver. If you go into the DMV and take a test at 18 years old with zero education and little time spent on the road, how on earth are you gonna be prepared to drive for the rest of your life? Are you going to learn as you go? What happens then, you are involved in a head on collision and kill yourself and/or someone else? But you were just learning as you go.. Right? Driver education needs to be required no matter what age you are. It isn’t right to have some people spend two months learning and testing and training just to take their test while other people wait a year or two and are handed their license just because they could drive the speed limit with the person testing them in the car. We all know the majority of kids who go to take their driving test completely fake it until they make it.

Does anyone honestly believe a newly licensed teenager is actually driving around town the way they did when they took their test. It was a facade they put on so they could pass the threshold. Now we have just given a license to some kid that is going to immediately go pick up his or her friends and speed around without a care in the world. Kids ages 16-19 are 3 times more likely to be involved in a fatal car accident than anyone else. Driver education need to be required and enforced because if it isn’t parents are going to continue worrying, and some are going to continue grieving because there son or daughter who was so close to really starting their life has just died because they were handed a license after taking a test on road signs and driving in a circle for 10 minutes. There also should never be an age at which people can stop taking their driving test. It should be required every four years as should the written exam. It may seem useless, because after a while a person should be trusted to know what they’re doing shouldn’t they. And for a while I’m sure they can be. But what happens when a person gets older, their vision and hearing wears and their memory starts to go. They aren’t able to perform behind the wheel like they once could. My own grandmother drives with both of her feet. She gets into multiple small accidents a year. She speeds, she ignores road signs, and no one is gonna ticket a little old lady so she drives freely day to day being a menace on the road and she has no idea she’s even doing anything wrong. There is a problem with the system and we need to fix it. Before more people die.