Decreasing the Statistics in Vehicle Accidents

On Monday, February 19th of 2024, I was at work when my husband called me. When I answer, I’m confronted with everyone’s worst fear. My husband on the other line in a panicked voice, telling me he was in an accident. In the span of 45 seconds, I logged out of my call system and in my car. Once making it to the scene, I found my husband’s car smashed, pieces of his engine covered the road, and the front end of his 2010 Dodge Charger was gone. My husband was on his way home from work, a seventeen year old girl came into his lane. The girl side swiped the vehicle in front of my husband, after that she crashed head on with my husband with both vehicles traveling at about 55 miles per hour. I found my husband in a ditch on the road with paramedics buzzing around him, his face was covered in blood from a cut on his eye where his head slammed into the steering wheel. We do not know why the girl did this, there was no evidence of intoxication or medical emergency. This girl went through the same driver’s education program as the girl who crashed into him, causing me to wonder what made the difference in our education to her? Since that day, I continue to count my blessings that my husband is not a part of the statistics this prompt provides.

Reducing the number of automobile accidents would improve our society, decrease the fear of traveling, supplementarily helping minimize the epidemic of road rage that we see all over social media. The estimation of how many people killed globally is over one million people (Road Traffic Injuries and Deaths—A Global Problem, 2023). According to the CDC, in 2010 the cost of car accident damages across the world was 1.8 trillion dollars. That is 29% of the 6.13 trillion dollars the United States federal government spent in 2022 (Fiscal Data Explains Federal Spending, 2024). There are copious ways that the world could spend almost two trillion dollars, including the improvement of the infrastructure that vehicles travel on. The money can be used for research alongside development of better safety measures in vehicles, furthermore making safe vehicles more affordable to lower income citizens who often must make decisions on purchasing a car based on price rather than assurance.

Reducing the frequency of accidents is a difficult process for the reason of regulation. How do you regulate an action that cannot possibly be monitored 24/7? How do you monitor every individual vehicle’s speed, its health like the engine, brake system, or the tire pressure? As a call center agent who works for over two hundred dealerships, there are a myriad of different factors in any accident. Wearing a seatbelt as well as its effectiveness is crucial. My husband’s seatbelt kept him inside his vehicle, evident by the bruise across his lower hips, but it didn’t lock in time to prevent his head from slamming into the steering wheel. Compared to his father who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, causing him to lose the ability to walk for the rest of his life because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt when he ran off the road into a ditch.

One of the greatest issues drivers face is distractions, and phones are only part of the problem. A horde of things can distract us, like a mom with a taxi full of kiddos, or a cool aunt that just picked up her kitten from the vet who is meowing in discomfort. Personally, I suffer from anxiety and multiple times I’ve pulled over after a situation has made me anxious, which could be as little as a wobbling truck and trailer. Several of us, including myself, do not give ourselves the time to breathe, in spite of the reports saying that it can cause heart palpitations, shaking, and interferes with concentration (World Health Organization: WHO, 2023).

A controversial opinion I support is more testing for renewal of someone’s license, though many only consider the elderly in that. In North Carolina, you are not obligated to come to the DMV to renew your license, you can simply go only apply with no testing required (Dean, 2022). We could increase road safety if there was more education including testing, this could look like every ten years you take a short driver’s ed class before you can renew, young as well as elderly. This may be inconvenient to many, but it could be worth saving even one life from a fatal accident. A family member of mine received a speeding ticket for going 20 mph over the speed limit and they let him off by making him take driving classes, but why do we wait for a law to be broken before reviewing what we learned as teenagers?

To conclude, the number of vehicle accidents is not going to decrease on their own, it is up to every individual to make the choice to drive as cautiously as possible, because you never know when a seventeen year old is going to come around a corner to create a three vehicle accident.