Driving Scholarship Essay

In my own personal opinion, driver’s education is very important. Personally, when I was younger, I had always thought that people drive with both the left and right foot. But as I grew older, and learned about driver’s education, I figured out that only one foot is used all the time. I never had the motivation to learn how to drive because I was always terrified to drive after I turned 16. But because of driver’s education, I was able to get an outside view of what it feels like to drive and learned that driving is not really all that bad. Recently, I saw a video of a woman driving too close to the wheel and using both feet. People like that make me wonder why driver’s education is no longer a required course because they can eventually become hazards to others who are either learning to drive or have already been driving for a long time. I believe that driver’s education is important because I was never encouraged to take it until I was a junior in high school because I was planning to be commuting to and from my college.

This may seem like it’s contradicting, but there’s not many steps that can be taken to reduce the deaths that are related to driving. While a person may not be physically blind, they still aren’t paying attention to their surroundings and may not see what’s going on ahead of them. Although there are laws to prevent texting and driving, still so many people do it because a majority of the time, it cannot be proven that the person was on their phone while driving unless there’s a camera. Additionally, driving under the influence is also illegal, but people still do it. One step that I believe may be helpful is to do regulated eye and health checks on the elderly because their vision can go south fairly quickly and may cause more accidents. Yes, they may lie about their health, it is better to have them checked regularly anyway since they are getting older. And while I know that the show Grey’s Anatomy is not very accurate, they do have an episode that does show how regulated check ups on the elderly can be important. The episode has this older couple that accidentally crashes into a store because the man started to lose feeling in his legs. But his wife gave him keys because he loved to drive even though they both knew that it would not be safe to do so. So in conclusion, there really are not many steps that can be taken to reduce the amount of deaths related to driving.

While I have not personally been in any accidents or have seen anyone I know to drive recklessly, I have witnessed a fair few accidents. I once saw someone on a bicycle get hit by an unaware driver. The person was fine, just hurt and scared due to falling off the bike onto asphalt, almost falling into oncoming traffic. While I could not stop due to me having to get to school, I still wondered what happened to the person. They ended up being okay with a few minor injuries that I cannot remember. Additionally, I have seen a kid from my own high school getting into a far worse accident on his way home. The kid was riding a moped and the car he was passing did not see him and hit the moped, sending the kid flying into the asphalt and scraping his face in the process. The kid had to get his jaw wired shut due to the incident. Another incident that I saw the aftermath was, a car driving over the median and hitting another car in the turning lane. While I do not know what exactly happened, seeing that aftermath made me realize that I do need to take the right turn a lot more slowly than what I usually see people take. It’s better to save my life and others rather than risk lives to cut a few extra seconds off my estimated time of arrival.

Steps that I can personally take to become a better driver as well as help others around me is to be more cautious of my surroundings and teach my own brother or younger cousins as well to do the same. Especially since they’ll be driving soon, I do not want anything to happen to them while they are on the road. I can only hope that they do not do anything that will or may hurt themselves while they drive. Even though I am not able to teach my family how to drive, I can still set a good example.