Driving Safety

Standing on the sidewalk you see a car, zipping right by your home and right through a school zone without a second thought for the father and daughter standing at the crosswalk marked by a yield to pedestrians sign: why?

We can move hundreds of miles faster than we ever have before, cars are one of the most powerful tools that we as a human race have developed to better ourselves, but each stride we take toward a better future is also hindered by its eventual misuse: car accidents. The majority of car accidents do not happen intentionally but due to a lack of understanding of what the driver should be doing in certain critical situations. Especially within our modern society, there are a rising number of those who lack life-saving information and as a consequence are a hazard on the road to the safety of other drives. People who don’t know what they’re doing are more likely to think that they’re making the right maneuver and hit someone else without realizing they shouldn’t have done that; people who don’t know what they’re doing lead to confusion and collisions; people who don’t know what they’re doing are a danger on the road. Education is one of our most powerful tools in saving countless lives.

Although we are not limited to just tools to save lives, for instance, another wonderful tool to prevent driving-related deaths is simply to stop driving. No, seriously. Public transportation is far better for the environment and better protects its passengers than a conventional car due to its much greater mass according to the principle in physics of momentum, but in truth, all solutions boil down to educating others on better ways to drive and commute daily. Education is stressed through every person’s childhood and becomes no less important through adulthood in taking care of themselves, working, and especially driving, but we can change that. Just as neglected education becomes a tool to our demise, under the right circumstances education can drastically decrease the number of driving-related accidents as drivers would become more aware of their surroundings and more cautious before making maneuvers. Driving doesn’t have to be the dangerous activity that it has become over the years, and with the advent of AI driving and safety features driving has become significantly safer as driving assistance features can reduce the number of distractions and help the driver better focus on what truly matters while their behind the wheel.

However driving still has far to go before it is a truly safe activity, so much so that my grandfather has recently been a part of a car accident even with all of the progress we’ve made with safer driving. As he was cruising down familiar roads my grandfather was on his way out to the store and had come to a stop at a light. As the light turned green my grandfather began to move forward, but as he moved halfway through the intersection another car came speeding down the street with a red light but paid no attention to that fact.

BAM!

The second car had hit my grandfather’s car on the passenger side. Dazed my grandfather made a confused call to the 911 operator requesting help. Once my father received a notification from the first responders I dashed out to my grandfather’s side, but the man I saw there at the wreck was physically present and receiving treatment however spiritually he had drifted off only to recover hours later when embraced by my grandmother the light would return to his eyes. For months, his skin was swollen and cut and he would insist it was no big deal; ever since my grandfather has become hesitant to drive and purposefully avoids that fateful intersection for fear of what might happen again, for fear that the next time he might not make it out as he did.

But why does it have to be that? Why do we have to live with daily car accidents? Why can’t we do better? We can, and it only has to start small, for example with just me. I can teach new drivers how to drive defensively and minimize distractions to drive safer; I can publicize car accidents in my school newspaper to help other students understand the impact of car accidents, reinforcing the negative image they already have and making them want to avoid them even more so; I can even write to my own legislators or local government to petition to put speed bumps on a residential road that most people speed on to better protect pedestrians. There’s always going to be more that I and everyone else can do to keep everyone safe on the road, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to do anything. Above all, saving human lives is the most important aspect everyone should have in mind, and we can save countless lives just by being a little more careful when driving, by giving ourselves plenty of time to make it to our destinations, and by driving within the speed limit;

so why don’t we?