Driver’s Ed Essay

Drivers Education

Hunter Benjamin

According to the CDC, over 32,000 people have a fatal injury in a car crash every year, not to mention 2 million more injuries in car related accidents. In 2015 a study was conducted by the NHTSA to determine about how many of these accidents were caused by human error, and it was discovered that around 94% of these accidents were human errors. With that enormous statistic in mind, It urges the question, what can we do?

The obvious first choice is to implement laws, which has been done, but still, even with these laws in place, it is clear that many do not abide by them. One of the bigger causes of this could be traced back to poor drivers education classes. In the state of North Carolina for instance, the classroom portion of drivers ed needs to be 30 hours, but there is only 6 hours required for road driving. The easiest way to learn to drive is based on experience and learning the rules of the road by properly experiencing it, not just by sitting in a classroom. A good solution would be to flip the hours. Give six hours of classroom instruction, and until the drivers ed instructor feels as though the student is proficient enough to travel on the road by themselves.

There are many courses offered outside of drivers ed, such as one called BRAKES, where defensive driving techniques are taught in a stricter manner than your standard drivers ed class. This has allowed for people to learn better techniques and how to properly adapt to changing road conditions. Having personally taken this class, I can vouch for the detail those kinds of organizations put into their lessons. From driving in unexpected conditions to what to do if you spin out or slip in ice, they teach you just about everything there is to offer. If these kinds of classes were integrated into normal drivers ed, the road accidents will decrease drastically.

Personally, I have been in a car accident where more detailed driving instructions from drivers ed could have possibly saved me from the accident altogether. On a wet highway on ramp, I lost traction and slid across all three lanes into a concrete barrier. There are many other factors that contributed to the accident, but having more experience with correcting a sliding car or not overcorrecting, I may have been able to keep myself from such a bad accident.

There are many options for people to learn newer, better techniques at defensive driving, but sometimes they can be costly and sometimes people may just not want to do it cause it is too far or they’re too busy. Having these kinds of classes merged with standard drivers education could lead to a safer road and driving altogether. There should also be significantly more hours taught to new drivers on the road so that we can decrease the number of new driver accidents, and allow people to better hold onto the initial knowledge they gathered, making it more difficult to develop bad habits on the road. If these changes are implemented, one could only imagine that it would reduce that 32,000 deaths to a much, much, smaller number.