Safe Driving on a National Level

Every year, over thirty thousand people die in car accidents in America alone . To help put it in perspective, that’s at least 80 people per day. Those statistics are neither satisfactory nor encouraging.. Logically, steps need to be taken to lower the death rate associated with driving. The main question this conclusion raises is, “What steps should we take to make driving safer: for the driver, for the passengers, and for pedestrians?”

Luckily, this is not a hopeless question. We don’t have to stress over complicated, time-consuming policies. All we need to do is provide better education for current and prospective drivers – as a bonus, creating more jobs for the American people.

To start, driver education should be our main form of accident prevention. As of today, there is a startling lack of driver education made readily available to today’s youth. Teenagers and young adults alike are expected to learn from a short, difficult-to-digest pamphlet combined with the presumed involvement of family members in teaching youths to drive safely- some of those family members not being safe drivers themselves.

This is not a realistic or efficient system. Wards of the state and children of sight-impaired individuals in particular will have difficulty finding a volunteer driving instructor. There need to be effective, readily available schools designed to teach safe driving methods and traffic laws. As a side note, it is no secret that there is a shortage of employment opportunities in the US. If driving schools were opened across the nation, it would provide thousands of jobs for unemployed individuals.

Apart from these driving schools, we should also have more learning resources available for purchase, such as ready-made decks of flashcards to learn traffic signals and signs. It isn’t enough for them to be printed in a pamphlet. A lack of interaction with the material makes learning significantly more difficult. Flashcards are a good way to remedy this, but not all people have the artistic abilities to accurately copy the images printed in books. Therefore, printed flashcards made available for purchase can help prospective drivers learn the necessary traffic signals and signs without printing out images and pasting them together, front to back. Arts and crafts don’t need to be a portion of the learning process when it comes to driver education.

Lastly, we need more effective reading materials. Short, poorly-written pamphlets aren’t helpful to the prospective driver. In-depth, clearly written textbooks need to be produced and made easily available. Apart from providing information, it could include test banks for learners to use when reviewing the material. The combination of input and output will help learners retain the information.

The United States needs better educated drivers to maintain safe roads and safe towns. The current driver’s ed materials are poorly made and poorly distributed. In order to better educate prospective drivers, driving authorities should open driver’s education centers, in addition possibly creating millions of employment opportunities for Americans to pursue. Further, companies should manufacture and distribute better driver’s ed materials, such as flash cards and text books. If these steps were taken, American drivers would be more educated, and drivers, passengers, and pedestrians would be much safer.