Distracted Driving: An Incurable disease

I was eleven years old, singing my heart out to Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA on a chilly afternoon in December. Within a flash of a second, I was spinning, nonstop. The car kept on spinning for what felt like an eternity before finally slowing down. My mother and I just sat there for a minute trying to process what had just happened. While sitting there in a state of pure shock, an officer knocked on our door, asking us to get out of the car to check on our health. We were truly fine, but as someone so young, I had no intentions of going back on the road any time soon and certainly had no plans of ever driving.

We were fortunate enough that none of us were seriously harmed. The lady who hit us apologized profusely, saying that she was looking back at her baby crying, resulting in her obliviousness to the red light she flew by. My original assumption was that she was sitting on her phone driving, but this taught me that distracted drivers come in all different forms. I did ultimately get over my fear of driving as my mom told me I was being a wimp, and that I should be grateful she doesn’t drive me around in a motorcycle as those are a million times more dangerous. Her friend had died in a motorcycle crash when she was younger, so this small crash went completely over her head.

Now that I am a teenager and driving my own car, I have seen a plethora of idiots on the road, and I often question how they passed the license test. From experiencing many near-crash incidents in my time driving, I have realized that I need to focus on defensive driving and being aware of others around me rather than just focusing on my own driving. To be quite honest, though helpful, driver education does not have the impact on preventing reckless driving that it should. Driver education teaches drivers the rules and regulations of the road, which is a very important part of driving. Through driver education, I have learned how to drive, but there is no way that it can teach drivers about dangerous situations when they appear on the road. People simply need driver experience. I know it is a requirement to have a certain amount of hours on the road, but I see many people lying about training time with an instructor. I believe DMV should partner with Drive Smart or some other organization to have the only driver’s instructional classes to ensure that people actually follow through with this requirement. This would allow drivers some of the adaptive skills necessary to respond to a potential accident from someone else recklessly driving. This will allow drivers more time on the road to learn of potential dangerous situations that may arise.

Though this may sound silly, a way in which the number of deaths related to driving can be limited is by pushing the date by which people can receive a license to 18. When looking at many countries that have a legal age of 18 to receive a license, the yearly car crash death toll is on average about 2,000 deaths compared to the U.S.’s 40,000 yearly death toll. Maturity is a huge part of driving. Though there are many crashes that are not the result of young teens, a good amount are the results of such immaturity. What I mean by this is that sophomores are annoying. As a senior, I do hold a lot of prejudice towards them and their inability to drive, but my opinion is beside the point. When teenagers first get a car, their natural instinct is to take videos, and pictures, and to invite their friends and show off their driving skills. There are certainly exceptions to this rule, but I have seen too many videos of sophomores recording themselves going 90 miles in a 40 because they think it looks cool. If the age gets pushed back a couple of years, then the U.S. limits a significant amount of technology use and immaturity on the road.

Another step that could be taken, though extremely difficult to pull off is through Apple and other tech companies. If tech companies could register when someone is driving and turn the phone into driving mode, this would limit significant usage of technology on the road, preventing accidents that stem from distracted driving. This would be extremely difficult to implement and would be met with a plethora of backlash, but would ultimately provide more safety to those on the road.

I am an extremely stubborn passenger. A step I take to help others become safer on the road is simply not letting them drive. When my friends and I go anywhere, I will always be the one driving. People my age are reckless, and many are illegally under the influence at many times of the day. I truly do not trust other people to drive. I hope that this limits their confidence and prevents them from driving much. Even if it doesn’t, I get these drivers off of the road for a good couple of hours every week, and every hour is an hour they are not on the road, making it safer.

Distracted driving is truly a disease that will haunt us for years to come. Distracted driving is the result of immaturity and a lack of experience on the road. It is in people’s nature to not take issues seriously until they personally experience them, making it difficult for people to understand the risks of distracted driving until they finally see the result of it in action. It is extremely difficult to limit such issues in driving, but small preventative steps can be taken by educating future drivers to ensure that they are the safest on the road that they can possibly be.