Better Safe Than Sorry in the Great American Pastime

Though baseball has historically been referred to as “the great American pastime,” I would go so far as to argue that the true great American pastime is driving. Most people either drive or are driven around in order to get to work, school, and other important items on their schedule. However, driving is a double edged sword, capable of enabling locomotive freedom and opportunity and causing swift and dire consequences. All-too-often I drive past an accident on I-295 driving to or from school, and I count my lucky stars that I’m fortunate enough to not have been in that area when it happened. Safe driving is one of the most important and necessary passive (and sometimes active) skills you can have in America, and yet we discuss it rather infrequently. Knowing how to drive safely is an integral part of making this country function better and improving the lives of all its citizens, by increasing the awareness of how easy it is to cause life-altering consequences to yourself and others, knowing that it happens rather often, and understanding not only that it is preventable, but also how to prevent it.

Driver education is important in lowering driving-related deaths because educated drivers can realize/recognize when they’re making bad decisions on the road, and then remove themselves from it. I in particular remember learning about driving tired when I was in Driver’s Ed in high school, and some strategies to combat it. The easiest, of course, was to pull over and rest for a bit, or if you know you’ll be tired before heading out, to ask someone else to drive you where you need to go. I know my brother has used this strategy and asked our mother to drive him places if he was feeling exhausted, and she was pretty willing to do it knowing that she’d prefer some inconvenience to a dire consequence of driving tired. Another strategy that I’ve personally used fairly often if I’m a bit tired is to only focus on something on the road for three seconds at a time, which keeps your mind from nodding off. These strategies have been very important to keeping myself and my brother safe on the road, and emphasizes how important driver education is in reducing deaths on the road.

Some steps that can be taken to reduce the number of deaths related to driving are to understand the gravity of driving, understanding the nature of traffic obstructions, and understanding/paying attention to traffic signs. Driving is an important if not mundane aspect of daily life, but this does not reduce its seriousness. Every time you drive your car, you’re operating machinery weighing thousands of pounds, sometimes multiton, often at speeds exceeding a mile a minute. This is not a task to take lightly. Remembering that when driving, your life and others can be put at risk if you don’t give it serious gravity can be the difference between life and death. If you’re about to drive your car after having a few too many drinks, you’re not likely to consider this responsibility due to the intoxication. In instances such as this, keeping this gravity in mind is even more important, because you should take steps to ensure your and other people’s safety before you start drinking. Another important step to remaining safe is understanding the nature of a lot of traffic. A lot of traffic is what’s called a “phantom” traffic jam, where traffic builds up due to small slowdowns in dense traffic that ripple into a larger buildup farther away. In this instance, the only real solution to this traffic is to try to maintain as much distance from the car in front of you as possible at a time to reduce the rippling effect. If the highway as a whole applied this logic, traffic would be far less frequent. Traffic obstructions such as lane closures, while slightly more complex at multi-lane closures, are relatively simple in nature. Generally these are considered “zipper merges,” where cars are intended to merge at the point of the lane closure. Cars will cause traffic if they do one (or both) of two things: changing lanes from the blocked to unblocked lane before the closure, and/or preventing cars from merging at the ‘zipper’ point. These options are tempting if you think that the closure signs are to warn people to merge early, but when viewed through the lens of an indication of a change in traffic pattern to be resolved at the point of change, these options immediately become counterproductive to maintaining traffic flow, which is important for aiding the safety of other drivers, as you would hope that other drivers would do for you. Finally, ignoring or fundamentally misunderstanding traffic signs is a frequent cause of accidents. I would say the two most common examples I see are turning right at red traffic lights or not properly yielding. If you are allowed to turn right on red, this is under the condition that the traffic is actually going to permit you to enter traffic easily. If you can’t, as much as this should be straightforward, don’t enter the flow of traffic. If there is no right turn on red, there is probably a reason, and doing so, whether on accident or on purpose, can lead you to discover why it’s prohibited very quickly, so checking whether it is permitted, and waiting if it isn’t, can be important steps to take in order to avoid potential accidents. Yield signs are another easy-to-ignore traffic sign that is immensely important to follow. In particular, I saw a video that greatly scared me of a car’s dashcam coming up rapidly through an entrance ramp and driving haphazardly around a driver that was stopped, yielding to traffic, in order to enter traffic. Doing so is very dangerous to all parties involved: yourself, the yielded driver, and the flow of traffic that may not have been able to accommodate your presence yet. Not all entrance ramps are acceleration ramps.

I have been in three automobile accidents/incidents in my life, none of which I was at fault for, and only one that I was driving in. In September of 2019 I was in the car with my mother and brother, just leaving our high school, when a car recklessly drove out of a dentist’s office without looking and T-boned our car. The car was totaled. In December of 2020, my mother and I were driving along a county highway, and we slowed down because a car in front of us was pulling into its driveway. However, the car driving behind us didn’t notice we were stopped, and rear-ended us. Finally, just this past year I was driving home from work, slowing behind a car that I assumed was slowed for the speed bump ahead, until we were both at a full stop. The car then began to back into their driveway without seeing me, which, given that my car was in the way, the car backed into me for a few seconds, and I was not able to process what was happening quickly enough to throw my car in reverse. Thankfully in all these instances, no one involved was hurt substantially; however, it cost significant amounts of time and often money. Time, in particular, is one of the most troublesome aspects of a car accident, because while you wait for a repair or for the news of a totaling, you have to adjust your lifestyle to being down a mode of transportation.

The easiest ways to be a safer driver are to keep focused on the road and to be patient on the road. Thousands of people are killed on the road as the result of distracted driving; in 2020, the number was 3,142, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and that is just the number of people who died as a result of it, not including total accidents or those who were injured in one way or another. Avoiding phone usage and driving tired are crucial to increasing your chances of being safe on the road. However, being focused is more than just making sure you aren’t distracted; sometimes accidents occur on the road that are out of your control, and even out of other people’s control. The ability to respond quickly and efficiently to hazards on the road is another important aspect of safe, focused driving. Patience on the road is also a virtue. Losing your patience on the road is a very easy way to cause an accident if you act on it. Weaving through traffic seems like a good way to arrive at your destination faster, but most of what you’re doing is becoming a hazard for other drivers by putting yourself unexpectedly in front of other drivers, and you are just as likely to be stuck at the same light with them toward the end of your drive anyway. In part this is because even though you feel like you’re moving much faster than the cars around you, you’re really only going maybe 10 mph relative to them, slow enough that if you considered how fast you’d be moving if they were sitting still, you’d find it silly how much effort you were putting in to move that slowly away from them. Additionally, getting angry with other drivers and, for instance, tailgating them, is an easy way to find yourself in a game of brake-check-chicken, which is not a game that you should want to see to the end. Both of these principles culminate in one particular piece of advice that I think everyone should hold close to their hearts: either pay enough attention to take the right exit, or take the one you’re on/next one and save yourself potential heartache. Whether it’s taking an exit too early or realizing you’re passing the exit you want, taking the wrong exit is no fun. However, the saying “a bad driver never misses their exit” is a somber and true reminder that it’s better to patiently work your way back onto the highway than to hurriedly rush to correct your mistake. In doing so, you don’t pay attention to your surroundings trying to react quickly, and miss cars around you, causing devastating accidents.

Understanding the nature of driving and traffic, how you can operate in and protect yourself in it, and how it affects people when accidents are caused, are incredibly important aspects of life, particularly in the USA. Hopefully, as time goes on and driver education becomes more thorough and more heavily-emphasized, driving-related deaths can begin to steadily decline. That starts, however, with the individual. By improving your driving safety, you increase the safety of all other drivers on the road, even if just by a small decimal, statistically. But that small statistic could be the difference between you wondering why you couldn’t have just taken more time to look around a corner, and going about your life normally.