A Teen’s View on Teen Driver Safety

Teen driver safety is an important public issue because young drivers are the most vulnerable to making mistakes or bad decisions due to their lack of experience and skill compared to older and more mature drivers. From 2014 to 2023, the amount of young driver-related fatalities has increased from a total of 4,285 deaths to 5,588 deaths. Driver’s education prepares young soon-to-be drivers for possible worst-case scenarios by providing them with video examples of situations that would lead to an accident, suchlike texting and driving. Driver’s education also, typically, provides multiple-choice questions involving a scenario to test the student’s problem-solving capabilities and if they would choose the safest method, ensuring that they will make safe decisions when driving. Otherwise, there’s an acronym for safe driving called, SMART. The “S” in SMART stands for “Scan” to remind young drivers to scan their surroundings, the “M” means “Manage” your attitudes and emotions, the “A” underlines “Accountability” for your actions, “R” reminds you to be “Ready” for anything, and “T” alerts drivers to stay tuned in and focus on the drive. The SMART acronym focuses on training young drivers to be mindful and aware of their surroundings to encourage safe driving.

Some of the most common reasons why teen drivers get involved in accidents is because of the distractions from their phones, the need to impress their peers, and the stress of learning a new skill. The addiction to our phones can resemble the addiction to gambling due to the variable schedule of receiving a reward. A gambling method, such as a slot machine, doesn’t have a set schedule for when the gambler is going to receive a reward, which is usually money. The unknown of when the gambler is going to receive the reward they hope for causes them to become addicted to gambling because the only way to get a reward is to keep trying. However, our phones work a little differently but give us the same amount of excitement and suspense a gambling machine gives a gambler. Phones give us notifications or texts from our favorite person as our reward. Unless an app has scheduled notifications, it is unknown when a notification is going to pop up or when our favorite person is going to text or call us. But when we receive the desired reward, we can’t help but keep our phones by us or constantly check it to feel that excitement we felt when rewarded. The phone addiction doesn’t abruptly go away while driving, especially for those who have the strongest addiction to their phones; teenagers. Teens may risk their lives and others’ by checking their phones while driving or texting someone back. Although even though the addiction can’t be paused while teens are driving, but it can be fought. If teens are willing, they could attempt to place their phone out of eyesight while driving to avoid the temptation of looking at it or checking for notifications, or they could go on Silent Mode before driving to stop notifications from popping up and pulling their attention away from their surroundings. Teens’ addiction to their phones isn’t the only cause of crashes though. Society can cause teen drivers to make bad decisions not only through their phones, but through expectations and standards. Teens, especially High School teens, find it impressive and attractive when somebody is rebellious and breaks the rules by speeding and driving recklessly. Typically, rebellious behavior is found attractive by women and men love breaking the rules and attracting women, so young men will usually drive recklessly to impress young women. Along with impressing the opposite sex, other peoples’ opinions are incredibly important to teens, mainly because of High School society, so teens will usually do anything to gain popularity, including reckless driving. The need to impress peers by driving recklessly can be reduced if the teen driver discovers a different, safer way to impress others and gain the popularity they wish to have. Other ways for teens to impress their peers could be getting good at a sport, winning a competition, or being friendly and kind to everybody.

Sometimes it’s not other people or addiction that influences unsafe driving behaviors but also could simply be the stress of learning how to drive or driving without an educator aiding them in the passenger seat. When a teen is first driving by themselves after receiving the proper education and passing the driver’s test, they may feel that they are expected to drive perfectly right away. There are many road ragers and impatient drivers on the road who will get angry at other drivers for going the speed limit or stopping fully at a stop sign, because as people get older, they typically stop caring about the rules of the road. So, the stress of angry drivers and wanting to be seen as a good and skilled driver could cause the teen to make bad driving decisions, suchlike speeding. To avoid the stress of expectations and pleasing impatient drivers, the teen driver could try to focus their attention on their other surroundings and not the feelings of the driver behind them, or they could let people know somehow that they are a beginner driver to possibly reduce the amount of anger being thrown at them.

I am currently 18 years old, so I am a teen driver myself. One moment that brought me great awareness to the importance of being aware of my surroundings while driving is when I was crossing an intersection that typically gets clogged up and another car was in front of me and abruptly stopped, causing me to slam on my breaks. At that moment, I didn’t know that the intersection typically got clogged and I didn’t expect the person in front of me to immediately break, so panic coursed through me when I slammed on my breaks, and I was very on edge for the rest of my drive. During the first couple months of when I started driving, I expected everybody around me to be aware of their surroundings and drive safely, so I thought I didn’t have to be much aware of the drivers around me. But I was mistaken because, no matter how experienced the driver is, they could still make bad decisions while driving. My driving educator always told me to expect anything to happen on the road and always be aware of my surroundings, and I decided to ignore that tip of his. But when I had to slam on my breaks because I wasn’t prepared, I realized that I shouldn’t have ignored what my educator had said to me and that I should always expect the unexpected. Teen drivers should also listen to others when they advise them to be aware of their surroundings, otherwise a terrible scenario could come out of not doing so.