There is No Substitute

As a child whose parents seemed to always be getting into car accidents, I figured that it was all a result of bad luck. With age I began to think that car crashes were a matter of circumstance, that living in a state with notoriously bad road rage was probably the largest contributor to the number of close calls that I was a passenger to. It wasn’t until I stepped onto the road as a new driver that I realized all the power and liability lays in the hands of the person taking the wheel.

Sitting through the in class portion of drivers ed seemed never ending to me, and the entire time I couldn’t help but wonder how difficult it could actually be. But getting in the car with an instructor was a completely different story. With time, my competency began to increase, but somehow my nerves never seemed to die down, and it was then that I understood that driving is a symbiosis between you and every other driver on the road. It is imperative that every person taking the wheel payed attention, not only in their drivers ed course, but is still paying attention to their surroundings. It doesn’t matter how safe or cautious a single driver is, because one wreckless driver can cause a world of hurt.

I think one of the biggest causes of uninformed drivers is that after the age of 18 (at least in my state), it is not required that a drivers ed student ascertain driving hours or even take the physical driving test, they only have to pass the written exam to get their license. This leads to flocks of high schoolers waiting until they’re 18 to get their license so they can avoid the extra work of driving under supervision. Even though instructor driving is tedious and long, I found it to be exponentially more helpful than the in class lessons when understanding the road and how to handle traffic.

Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people die from car accidents every year, the fear of them seems unusually low, and that is because after high school, it isn’t something people talk about. While it is true that informing new drivers is important, it is just as important to refresh jaded drivers who have been on the roads for years and may have become desensitized to the threat of operating 100 pound machines. It is imperative that refresh courses be required after a certain number of years on the road as well as making sure that every person going through drivers ed to get their first license be required to drive with an instructor, at least once, no matter how old they are.

Even though technology seems to surpass us in every way, even inhabiting our cars as blindspot monitors and cruise control, there is no substitute for safe and informed driving.