Death and Driving Dangerously

Death and Driving Dangerously

Driver education is vital in reducing the number of deaths related to driving accidents. While some events are truly inevitable, others can be avoided through vigilance, knowledge, and quick thinking. If we continue to improve our driver’s education programs, work harder to make safety features of vehicles more efficient, and push ourselves to be better drivers, the number of deaths in driving-related accidents could decrease dramatically. I, as a driver, can do things like continue to practice safe driving, checking my drivers education notes when I forget something I need, reach out to other drivers for help when needed, and never engage in distracted driving behaviors.

These things are very important to me because I was raised by an unsafe driver; my father is an alcoholic who often drove under the influence, and always took off/put on his seatbelt prematurely if he wore it at all. He taught us to drive while texting, drive while drinking alcohol, swerve through parking lots to avoid red lights, roll through stop signs, switch lanes unexpectedly without turn signals, and not consistently check things like gas, engine health, and oil.

Another thing I think would help us reduce driving-related deaths and injuries is something that I consider an overlooked necessity to driving: knowing how to take care of your car and recognize when it isn’t safe to drive it. Things like how to change a tire, work under the hood of a car, check tire pressure, discern what speed to drive at when road conditions are poor, etc., are not effectively teachable through PowerPoints. These are hands-on things that require “learning by doing”. There are real problems that arise when one cannot/does not do the aforementioned properly, well, or often, and while it is touched on in driver’s education courses, it is not a subject that we learn about in-depth and very commonly something that we forget the basic of as soon as we leave the classroom. Driver’s education includes brick and mortar learning, practice driving, at home practice driving, a knowledge test, and a skills test—we spend much more time sitting in chairs and learning through textbook information than through practicing the act of driving and vehicle safety, and we can ameliorate this by working toward more practice for driving necessities like car maintenance.

Lastly, I think we can reduce driving death by not shielding students from the gore behind the reality of driving accidents. Every time I drive, I think back to the horrors that my driver’s education teach told as a police officer; a little girl being decapitated by a semi, a college student who didn’t make it home for Christmas, a friend group who were tossed around a car before dying on top of each other. I think of the reality of driving unsafely, and it reminds me that there can be no slip ups. I cannot answer that phone call or eat on the way home, because lives are at stake and driving is a powerful, dangerous privilege.