drive safe before its too late

I did my own drivers education from June 2022, to July 2022. It was a very valuable course, and while I did it for free at my school, in the long term it is a good investment to get into a program.

One thing that everyone with or without drivers ed experience can agree on is that cars are dangerous. They are metal and they do not care about your life. They have safety features but they are not exactly safe. Now there are a couple types of death when it comes to cars. Either you get hit or you are in the car during a crash. In either case it can most often be prevented. Drivers ed talks about things that had you not taken the course you would have to find some other way to learn about it. This is what makes it worthwhile. Drivers education also teaches you the importance of safety in the vehicle, driving at night, mornings, and about the term defensive driving. Obviously these are all crucial to driving safely, because cars are able to just stop on a point. Reaction time, and speed all have something to do with how fast you can stop, and often it just takes 1 second for everything to go wrong. Now I’m going to talk about the steps to avoiding death while driving.

When driving, you have a lot of control over the safety of yourself and others. It is crucial to understand this or else things could go wrong. I think that in order to even be allowed to drive a car you should be required to do your driver’s ed. Unfortunately, not all crashes are caused by the driver. Sometimes it can be someone else being reckless, such as motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. The hard thing about driving is you can’t tell what other people are thinking. I’ve been in multiple situations where I almost hit bikes. I was on the Highway, doing the speed limit, and out of nowhere a biker sped past me in the breakdown lane as if i wasn’t even moving. For obvious reasons this is unsafe, and if something had happened, it is a bicycle. There is no layer of protection around you except for your clothes and helmet. I think that for motorcycles they should have the same rules as regular drivers. And if they do and are negligent about it, there should be further repercussions. Hitting someone not only hurts the person hit but it kills the consciousness of the driver. Whether it’s their fault or not. Another thing I want to talk about is non motorized bicycles. While we have bike lanes in some places, I’ve noticed that a lot of these bike lanes are not safe. They will be placed in high traffic spots, where someone can easily hit them. I think there should be more safety rules around bikers. A Lot of bikers don’t follow the rules of traffic, such as stopping at stop signs, signaling where they are going to go and more. A Lot of this is because no one stops them while they’re riding to tell them. I think that in order for bikers to ride in lanes they should have to take some kind of safety class. I have seen many bikers swerve in and out of traffic, and they have even less protection than motorcyclists do. We could also move around bike lanes. I know personally whenever I see a biker, I automatically get a little uneasy because their path can be unpredictable. Either way drivers should proceed with caution but so should the biker. I have had some experiences where it was the drivers fault around this sort of stuff.

I have never been in a bad car accident, but I have been in cars with reckless drivers. Every time I am , I feel super uncomfortable because I feel unsafe. I have had friends who drive over the speed limit past me and even that just makes me feel unsafe. The hard thing about being a teenager is that people will always group me with the other teens who aren’t as skilled at driving, or are too busy showing off to mind their safety. I have had multiple friends in these situations as well. One of my dear friends was in a car driving behind this truck towing a flatbed trailer, and thinking nothing of it. It turns out that there was a cinder block on board it that wasn’t properly strapped down, and it flew off and went through the windshield and destroyed there shoulder. Had it been even a couple inches the other way, this would have been directly towards the face, and it would have been fatal. At highway speeds, the cinder block would have no problem killing someone. It’s scary to hear about these things because it’s always something that someone could have avoided but didn’t, all it would take is one strap. I did my OSHA 10 training and we learned about the Hierarchy of Control. This is what to do in an unsafe situation. The first thing to try to do is eliminate the problem. This is something that definitely could have been helped, and it would have taken minutes to do.

I think personally what I can do to help others and myself become safer is have people get called out more for this kind of stuff. I have a friend who recently was in a car crash and the guy who crashed into him was drunk, had multiple DUI’s, had multiple crashes, and was still set free with little to no repercussions. That is not ok, these are serious things. Driving from point A to B is not a game, it is not always safe and it shouldn’t be treated as if it is. If I were ever driving safely I would want to have someone tell me so before it’s too late.