Making Driving Safer

Isean Bhalla

Making Driving Safer

Driver education is the most important factor in reducing the number of deaths as a result of driving. Many deaths on the road come from those who are uneducated about the risks related to driving, or don’t believe them to be serious. Educating drivers on what habits to develop is key to ensure safer roads. Oftentimes the biggest danger to you on the road is yourself or something/someone in your car. Educating people to recognize what to ignore (their phone) and what to pay attention to (the road) will go a long way to creating a safe road space. Education, however, is not the only way by which the roads can be made safer. Several other steps can be taken to reduce the number of deaths related to driving, especially at the design level. Replacing many intersections with roundabouts, for example, will drastically improve safety for many drivers, yet drastic redesigns of entire intersections aren’t always needed. Simple traffic calming measures can be implemented. Almost all of these have the goal to slash speeds, which will slash the number of fatalities. Sometimes this is through implicit cues such as faster light cycles, land narrowing, or curb extensions. Other times it’s more explicit–think speed humps, raised crossings, or reduced speed limits. Many of these design tricks are in use in other countries and have been proven to make roads safer for drivers and non-drivers alike. Another smart way to reduce the number of deaths related to driving is to reduce the number of people driving. By encouraging pedestrian activity, cycling, and transit usage, many drivers are taken off the road. Fewer people on the road means fewer fatal accidents. I myself know people who drive because it is a necessity, even though they are, in their own words, awful drivers. They admit they shouldn’t be driving, but because it is their only option, they are forced to.

All of this, however, is not tangible action that everyday people can take to increase their road safety. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for you to make your driving experience any safer. Anyone can take a few simple steps to make driving safer for everyone. The first of these is to reduce one’s speed. The faster one drives, the more likely one is to kill themself or others in a crash, or even to crash in the first place. If everyone drove a few miles per hour under the speed limit (instead of a few miles per hour over,) countless lives would be saved. Encouraging others to drive slower is also key. Speeding, a sometimes lethal behavior, is often glamorized in our culture. We should instead encourage those we know to go against the grain and slow down. A great way to do this would be to lead by example and drive slower yourself. This isn’t the only tangible, easy way to increase safety on the road. Another thing to do would be to make sure that you, or anyone you know, never drinks before driving. Even if you stay under the legal limit of alcohol, studies have shown that even an imperceptibly small amount of alcohol significantly impairs your ability to drive safely. By making sure that you or your friends and family never drive under the influence in any circumstances you can make sure that you or those closest to you avoid a lethal, preventable, crash. From better design, to bucking the “speed culture”, there are many ways we can make the roads safer. But the most important tool we have is education. We can educate ourselves that we need to drive slower, we can educate others not to drink at all before driving, we can educate planners on better design, we can educate new drivers on how to drive safely. Education is the key to making our roads safer and reducing the vast amount of unnecessary deaths on the road.