Combating Our Driving Culture

Zooming through the street, adrenaline courses through your veins and the roar of the engine incites your desire to press on the gas pedal, to go faster and faster past the one, two, and now three cars that were in front of you. “You only live once,” you keep thinking as the excitement compels you to speed and turn the music to the max. But what you are not thinking about is that the person in the car across the street or on that crosswalk right in front of you also only lives once. What you are not thinking about is that the thrill of driving recklessly can cost the life of a human being, a person who woke up not knowing this day would be their last.

My family friends’ father was a lawn mower who decided to stay just a bit longer to cut some grass he did not have to cut. Around the time he would normally be heading back home, a reckless driver under the influence of drugs sped through the lawn and killed him in an instant. The driver drove away and this man’s dead body was left in the uncut grass. Through hundreds of missed calls and a painstakingly slow, restless night, his wife and son only heard the news the morning after the tragedy. This man had plans to go home to his family. He had plans to teach his son how to drive, but now his son lost his father within a couple seconds because of careless driving. One cannot help but think, “How different would life be if he had chosen to go home early?” “What if he was standing a couple feet further away?” The driver left making a bad choice, but the wife and son are left with the consequence; one person’s irresponsible decision should not be the cause of another family’s regret.

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Everyone thinks that they are invincible to the tragedies on the road, warranting irresponsible and distracted driving. No matter if it is one second of high speed on the street or even a glance at your phone, you risk others’ lives and your own by driving distracted. Driver education does not emphasize enough that distracted driving can be short but very dangerous.

I remember seeing a documentary on distracted driving at school, and it has changed my perception of driving ever since. If you were walking and almost bumped into someone on the curb, would you flip them off or chase after them? It sounds like an absurd thing to do, so why do we normalize this behavior when we are driving? Since our faces are covered and the car is fundamentally what everyone else sees on the road, we tend to lower our humanity in cars. We see road rage every day, ultimately indicating that drivers do not generally humanize each other on the road. This becomes an even greater problem when we factor in reckless driving because now we can understand how easily driving can become individualistic and selfish.

We normalize blasting the speakers, speeding, eating, taking a call, or even chatting while driving and we are not taught in general driver’s education that, when driving, even a bit of distraction or irresponsibility can lead to habits that can ruin someone’s life. When I went with my cousin and his friends to the mountains during the winter, we were going at very high speeds even on the icy roads. There were moments when going up the mountain in which my cousin had to make very sharp turns up to four times in a row; one of those times, we were very close to the railing that separated us from the steep fall beneath us, yet we just laughed it off and vaguely told him to be careful. These moments continued to happen and my cousin continued to drive fast until we found ourselves swerving in a ditch a couple feet below the side of the highway that was mere moments away from where the railing stopped, a couple feet from a fate that could have been so much worse. Because his friends were in the car, my cousin just wanted to simply mess around and see how fast he could go in such conditions. However, we have to be aware that the everything we do while driving requires conscientiousness; if the roads are icy, you need to drive at a pace that is safe or if you are simply chatting with a friend in the car, you must recognize that it causes distraction and begin to drive with extra caution.

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Our first step as a society is to increase our patience on the road and realize that the drivers behind each steering wheel are real people with different levels of experience. Some people who tend to speed will most likely get impatient with others on the road who are following the rules. When I was first learning how to drive, angry drivers flipped me off and passed me when I drove the speed limit; clearly, we have built a culture that more often encourages speeding and criticizes following the rules of the road.

Indeed, learning to follow the rules of the road is one thing, but learning the psychology of it (i.e. the adrenaline that encourages one to speed, the way one interacts with others on the road) is just as important, especially in preventing unsafe driving. In other words, by learning why we want to break the rules, we can combat reckless/distracted driving at the root.

The next step is to provide realistic examples and solutions rather than idealistic ones when teaching people to drive. For example, some people truly want to listen to music or a podcast while driving, and people probably will not listen if we tell them to simply drive in silence. In cases like this, we should emphasize that driving with no distractions is ideal, but if not possible, drivers should drive with as little distractions as possible (i.e. music/podcast turned to a low, comfortable volume).

Another worthy addition is that we can keep each other in check on the road by, for example, using the horn to remind the car in front to move or to help prevent an accident rather than as a tool to express your anger. Drivers should also practice defensive driving to keep everyone safe by keeping their eyes on the road and checking their surroundings for any potential dangers.

Improving our current driving culture and enforcing safer driving habits (i.e. defensive driving) are the most vital things we must emphasize in driver education to eradicate recklessness on the road and make our roads safer. Together as a society, we can begin to create a safer and more responsible driving culture that will save lives.