The Importance of Safe Driving

Car accidents, we all know the kind. The ones that drag you in with the fluorescent lights illuminating the darkness of the highway, the surreal picture of strangers clinging to loved ones with tear soaked faces and the most horrid part of all, the ear piercing sound of an ambulance siren on its way to pick up the broken pieces. We all know the kind, we all want to look away, but can not. And then we forget. Just like that, the scene has passed, Taylor Swift is on the radio and the severity of the accident is no longer an area of our concern. Thinking about it, it is hard to imagine one could forget something so vivid, so why is it that we do? The clear most evident answer is purely monotony, in this day and age with such high levels of deaths from car accidents, it is easy to merely forget the real danger of cars to begin with.

Driver education is the utmost critical constituent on the path to less deaths from driving. For young drivers, driving is purely excitement and freedom, the concepts of death make no appearance on a child’s sweet sixteen. For that very reason it is even more important to forgo a driver’s training course. With this extra education nerves and anticipation will ideally be masked by preparation and driver’s intuition when beginning to drive. No one wants to encounter a car accident, which influences those with the proper training to adhere to the rules. Driver education teaches participants to drive defensively, encouraging them to be cautious on the road. By training aware drivers, distractions will decrease on the road resulting in less car accidents and less deaths.

Going hand and hand with driver education, is exposure to severe driving mistakes. As humans we all possess an ideology that we are one step down from superhuman. The concept of “that could never happen to me”, seems to serve as the leading cause of driver carelessness, The hard reality is, humans scientifically cannot multitask, meaning that every time both eyes veer from the road, an accident could occur. For this reason, it should be drilled into the mind of society that car accident deaths are not one in a million, they are very prevalent in today’s world and anyone could be next.

During my sophomore spring break in high school, one of my best friends was home for the week, driving down I-69 late at night and put his car through the guard rail, rolling it five times. I will never forget the feeling I got receiving a heart wrenching call from back home in the middle of the night. Mason came out of the wreck with a totaled car and without a single scratch. We joke around now calling him invincible, but the truth is the wreck stood as a lesson for my friends and I. To prevent more instances like this from happening, I find myself reminding my friends to slow down or buckle up in hopes to ensure their safety on the road. It is important to remember that the car wreck on the side of the road could be you one day, so be aware, be educated and drive as if your life depended on it.