Safe Driving

Safe Driving

By: Karter Zengil

Driver safety is important for everyone to know and not just the young people just learning how to drive but the people who have been driving for years. According to asirt.org there are 38,000 fatalities every year from car accidents and 4.4 million that cause serious injury. Some of these accidents are something that we could prevent if everyone remembered driver safety. For example, I have recently taken my driver safety 2 years ago and they preached keeping your hands on the wheel and not texting and driving. But every year there are nearly 1.6 million car accidents are caused by texting and driving and nearly 21% of teens involved in a fatal accident were texting and driving. They also talked about other avoidable accidents like driving under the influence, which was the reason that 10,511 people were not able to come back home. Driver safety is extreme import because it can prevent this by showing the facts and statistics on easily avoidable accidents like these. The steps that we can take to prevent these fatal accidents or reduce the number of them are amazingly simple. If you are just starting to drive in your teen years focus on the road and don’t let anything else around you distract you, put the phone away it can wait till you get to where you are going. And now most cars have Bluetooth radio so if someone really needs to get a hold of you, they can just call. Another step that we can take to reduce the number of fatal car accidents is do not drive under the influence, it is so easily. If you went out and had a few drinks or took something that could impair your decision making do not get behind the wheel of a car. It is better for you to call a uber or have a friend come pick you up, it is not worth risking your life and possible someone else’s. And this step I hold true because over the summer one of my football teammates was riding in a car with a driver that was under the influence, along with 2 other passengers. They were heading home on Highway D which is a winding road. They were coming home late at nigh while it was raining, and the driver decided to have some fun and speed up. This led to them flipping the car and my teammate and the one of the other passengers were ejected from the car. My teammate was in a coma for 1 week and the other passenger was in the ICU for 2 months. He was an all-conference line backer and was told he could never play football again and missed any chance of playing college ball. So I know to help others and to make me a better driver I will never drive distracted and also never driver under the influence so I can keep myself and other on the road safe.