Back Seat=Life

Back Seat= Life

Hundreds of thousands of people die every year due to car crashes because they were distracted behind the wheel. The fact is that the average time to read a text from your phone takes about seven to eight seconds, in that time a car could hit their brakes in front of you because a deer is in the road or maybe someone cut them off. In 2018 alone, almost 3,000 people died in a car crash due to being distracted and about 400,000 were injured. These stats are why driver education is important, if you’re dead, you’re dead, you can’t come back to life, that’s the reality of the situation. We need to make an impact on changing those numbers from thousands, to the hundreds, then to 100 then all the way down to zero. I am not saying that we won’t have any deaths, but we should try to prevent it and there are ways that we can do this. There are steps in which we can take to reduce the number of deaths on the road, step one and really the most important one: put down the phone. The National Safety Council reported over one million of the car crashes every year are due to phone usage while driving. Step two is something that should always be done before you put the car in gear: buckle up. Nearly 50% of the time after a car crash people weren’t wearing a seatbelt, so the point is; nobody is too cool to wear a seatbelt. Step three is just logical yet people still don’t listen to it: don’t drive while intoxicated. Although the number of deaths by driving while intoxicated has decreased by about 3% about 10,000 people still die from an intoxicated driver or they were the driver. These are the top three steps and rules we should follow in order to reduce the number of deaths on the road. I have personally been affected by these statistics. Almost two years ago I had six friends get in a car accident and two of them were fatal. One wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and flew through the windshield of her car and died instantly, another ran a red light because he was on his phone and he was hit on the driver’s side by a F-150 Raptor. I personally never go into a friends car unless I have their phone in my hand or it is out of reach, I also make everyone put on their seatbelts, especially when I am the one driving. My dad will sometimes text and drive and sometimes he does it at a stoplight, he will even take phone calls when he is driving, but my mom is a complete opposite, she never has her phone in her hand, and if she gets a text she gives me her phone for me to reply, when a call comes in she lets it go to voicemail. There are some steps I can take personally to keep others and myself safe. One way I can do this is to always wear a seatbelt, which is something I already do. Second is throw my phone in the back seat before I start driving and just pick one radio station to listen to while I drive so that I am not constantly switching between them and taking my eyes off the road. But these are steps everyone should take in order to save lives, people have lives, family, and kids, so don’t take that away from them because you don’t like a song on the radio or your friend is texting you about the homework that was due a week ago.