Never Someone’s Lillie

I have always been the girl with her hands at ten and two, blinker used, never above the speed limit, and never pulled over. Driving is a privilege to me and I am responsible for everyone else’s life on the road. I treated driver’s ed and all the training incredibly seriously, to the point where my dad would repeatedly remind me, “It is not that serious, Lillie.” To me, it was. In short, driving has always been a point of anxiety for me.

This anxiety was sparked when I was in physical therapy for a broken arm. At one of my sessions, I met a girl with massive burns all over her body having to relearn how to walk. We were paired together to do exercises and during these mundane times, we would share our stories. She was a street racer and her injuries were a result of one of these excursions gone wrong leaving her car on fire, her two other friends dead, and her in pain. The other driver’s name was Lillie – my name. Our pairing together was not just physical therapy, it was emotional therapy for her as well. I felt a pit form in my stomach as I realized the impact reckless driving can have and vowed never to be the Lillie in someone else’s story.

Reckless driving and death became synonymous in my head ever since. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 51,490 fatal crashes in 2018, reckless driving was the cause of more than half of these. If we eradicated reckless driving, 25,745 of these crashes would cease to exist. Additionally, in 2019 the CDC reported that the leading cause of teenage deaths as car crashes caused by reckless driving. These statistics do not lie and cannot be ignored; reckless driving causes death and car crashes. While there will always be the few outliers that ignore the rules of the road and wreak havoc, there are ways to diminish the amount and thus the effect.

Driver’s education is the only way to stop this behavior. Knowing the rules of the road helps to eliminate reckless behavior when driving. There have been multiple times where my friends will merge into another lane in the middle of an intersection. When I brought this to their attention, they had no idea that this action was illegal and therefore reckless behavior. Little facts like this get lost in translation due to how we are taught the rules of the road. As students, we learn all the information for a driver’s permit online at our houses. This environment is filled with distractions such as family members, the television, and our phones making it no wonder that people will get distracted and information will slip through the cracks. While some people may argue that these websites administer tests over the information confirming that people have learned these rules and they just ignore them, answers to these tests and quizzes can easily be found on the internet. Multiple people I know have admitted to using Quizlets that have the answers or Chat GPT, nullifying the effectiveness of these tests completely.

Driving is ingrained in the society of America. It is an important foundational skill that everyone should possess just like geometry, US history, and health which are all classes taught in school. Driver’s education should be a mandated class incorporated into high school curriculums. Not only would this help to eliminate distractions, but now that it is an actual class people would treat it more seriously as it now affects your GPA boosting its importance and effectiveness. In addition, it would also help lower-income families who can’t pay for the education or who don’t have access to wifi, internet, and technology to complete the education, expanding the reach of driver education.

In addition to this, providing driving classes available on campus once the kids receive their driver’s permit would be beneficial as well. Numerous kids struggle to find a place or time to learn how to drive and many parents aren’t effective teachers and could allow risky habits to form without knowing that they are dangerous or will simply lie about the amount of hours their child practices driving. Providing the opportunity to drive with an educator during school or after who is trained for this would allow for the fundamentals to be solidified and in turn better driving habits to form. Starting these good habits from the beginning will help them carry over into the future, rather than trying to learn them later in life after years of bad driving habits have built up and become routine.

In conclusion, how should we expect our future generation of drivers to develop good driving habits with the way we are taught today? We must first change the way young students are taught how to drive and then watch as reckless driving slowly drifts away and with it the unnecessary death and injuries.