Every Little Bit Helps

I remember reading a saying once that, “A bad driver is safe until they meet another bad driver.” However, I do not believe that this saying is true. It only takes one bad driver, one small accident, and one little mistake to turn someone’s and their loved ones’ lives upside down. Therefore, I strongly advocate and encourage others to exercise safe driving practices and will not move the car until everyone is buckled up and ready to go. To me, driver education is one of the most important factors that can reduce the number of deaths because of driving. Not only does it keep drivers or passengers safe, but pedestrians, bicyclists, and other civilians as well. By teaching new drivers or old drivers the art of driving and how to acknowledge traffic laws, we can all be safer.

While driver education within a classroom and a controlled environment can only take you so far, the key skills they teach you will allow you to adapt to any number of serious or unexpected situations. For some, there is the additional advantage of being scared straight. With the number of videos, we watched in driver education classes, my fellow students and I were even more cautious of reckless driving and found these individuals easier to identify. Driver education allows one to have rules and advice to reflect on. Without driver education, we would all follow our own rules of the road, and the world would erupt into chaos.

Steps that can be taken to reduce the number of deaths while driving are innumerable. However, some of the easiest ways to reduce the number of deaths related to driving are exceedingly simple. I will list a few. Look both ways when crossing the street as a pedestrian or when backing out from a parking space as a driver. Making sure everyone is buckled up and sitting up properly before moving the car out of the park is another. Even simply turning your turn signals on or making sure your headlights are on are simple mistakes that have led to car accidents either because of neglect or simply the act of slipping a driver’s mind.

Being a courteous driver also helps. Letting a fellow driver gently know that their headlights are off or that their turn signal isn’t working is an easy way to reduce car accidents and related deaths. They may not know and by you alerting them to this fact they may be prompted to get their car checked out or simply switch their headlights on.

As someone who has been in more than a few car accidents, I know from experience that this situation is never good for anyone and yet it can happen so quickly and with no one being at fault. To recount a few, it was raining hard one time in a parking lot, and I remember my mother backing out slowly as she couldn’t see too well. Suddenly, a black car came out of nowhere and slammed into our taillight causing us both to jerk back and forth suddenly, which we found out later injured my mother’s neck. While the driver was relatively nice and we exchanged insurance readily, it made my family a bit more wary of driving in serious weather conditions. Another time, I was with my father, and we were driving in the far-right lane when suddenly a rogue car shifted over four lanes and straight into the side of our car! Airbags shot out of everywhere including the wheel, injuring my father’s hand, and we found out it was because the man hadn’t been looking where he was going! He simply felt like he needed to get into the right lane and slammed into us without regard for our safety and sadly my father’s reaction time was not quick enough to prevent this accident.

While we all ultimately emerged from this experience alive and not too injured, I encourage all drivers, me included, to take the simple steps of being aware of your environment. Not listening to music or lowering the volume on your speaker to stay alert to sudden developments, making sure everyone is seated upright and buckled up, and always if people may not see you when turning a corner would allow us all to increase our cautiousness and arsenal of skills to become safer on the road. Encouraging practicing these habits with your friends and family as well as strangers will allow us all to hopefully prevent or at least unnecessary death and injuries now increasingly present on our roadways. Drive safely, guys, for your sake and ours.