Deadly Freedom

I saw one less kid in the hallway, one less kid in study hall, one less kid at lunch. He didn’t transfer schools or skip class. He was missing because he was dead. The last remnants of himself, a dead child in the seat of a car, crashed not from the pedal but from carelessness. The most dangerous part of a car is the person driving it.

A solid driving education isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessity. This country gives us vehicles to drive before guns, which may seem reasonable, but both are equally lethal in terms of deaths per year, and it’s much easier to accidentally harm someone with a vehicle than with a firearm. A good driving education means teaching the lethality of vehicles similarly to that of which guns are taught to have. We all associate guns with death. You hold a gun and are immediately focused and aware, at least the typical person with a healthy respect for gun safety. However, with a car, you hop in and maybe it’s a little scary for a while as you learn to drive, but at a certain point you lose care. I find even myself to fall into this lack of care at times because vehicles are more so treated by society as a bicycle or a mobile home, in a sense. Cars are comfortable and easy to operate, all you have to do is look out the window, press the gas lightly, and sit in a nice comfortable chair. Cars must be treated almost as weapons, ones that are at all costs to be restrained.

While caution, whether incited by fear or an understanding of it, may be the most important factor in preventing vehicle deaths, education itself is also vital. Most driver’s education centers, I can imagine, teach you in a relatively similar way, preparing you to drive with tests, instructed driving sessions, and lessons. However, the issue is that people often become too comfortable driving after they finish their education.

Being comfortable isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as being comfortable on the road generally means you’re a relatively adequate driver–or in other cases, a careless one–but there’s a difference between comfort and over comfort. Being that driver’s ed typically does its job in teaching safety and inciting fear with videos, the problem, in my opinion, isn’t with drivers education itself. What I think should be changed the most, still under the umbrella of fear, is not necessarily more police, but higher repercussions for violating traffic laws. This could mean higher speeding fines or an extended loss of license, but regardless, to ensure safe driving effectively, people must have some degree of fear. While it’s all great and good to believe that people should simply just do things because it’s the right thing to do–and vice versa–but that’s more idealistic than realistic. People who speed aren’t so worried about repercussions because, odds of getting caught aside, the fines for doing so aren’t generally too hefty. It’s like stealing a TV, getting caught, and having to pay forty dollars. If that were the case, everybody would be stealing TVs left and right!

Caution and fear seem to dominate the concept of safe driving, and rightfully or not, that’s how it works under human nature. When the kid I mentioned in the beginning was driving carelessly, speeding and not paying attention, he wasn’t worried about any fines or license revocations. The dopamine from the thrill of driving without caution outweighed the fear of being punished or harming anyone. Thousands of kids meet this same fate, which is entirely needless, tragically so.

Human behavior is largely based on motivation and ability. The ability to drive carelessly is given immensely–speeding requires a light press of your foot, distracted driving requires a quick glance at your phone. While the ability portion is difficult to change, the motivation most certainly can be. With stricter repercussions, the motivation is lowered proportionally. Had laws been changed to up the ante of fines before my schoolmate died, he may very well have refrained from driving recklessly because of the disproportionality of its thrill and its repercussions, in turn surviving and continuing to walk the halls, do homework, and chat at lunch as before.

Overall, while there may be multiple solutions, what I see to be the most effective is to increase caution in drivers through healthy fear. If you fear punishment more than you desire its catalyst, you will be a great deal more cautious and safe than if the opposite were true. Thousands of children’s and adults’ lives could be spared as easily as raising a few numbers.