
Name: Opal Lambert
From: Los Angeles, CALIFORNIA
Votes: 0
Preventable Accidents
Preventable Accidents
We got into an accident a couple years ago; my family had gone out for burgers. My mom usually pushes the speed limit, but that day she wasn’t. It wasn’t a big thing, anyway: someone sped through an intersection without realizing they didn’t have right of way and smacked into our car. No one was genuinely at risk of being killed, since no one was going very fast, but my mom ended up with a shoulder injury that she never fully recovered from.
I recently learned how to drive. Every time I cross an intersection, I hold my breath, tighten my grip on the wheel, tense my shoulders. I’m always thinking, what if someone runs a red light? Or worse, if there’s no red light, how can I trust drivers to know who has right of way? Or what if I get the right of way wrong and give someone an injury like my mom’s?
These thoughts terrify me. I know that logically, a good drivers ed could fix this, but I never know who has access to it. That’s the thing: it would help for drivers to be educated on rules like right of way. Knowing which car should go first and sticking to that rule could have prevented my mother from being in pain for five years. At one point, she couldn’t move her arm up more than 90 degrees. And though fortunately no one was at risk of dying, if we had been going too fast, that very easily could have been a possibility.
The thing is, right of way has a consistent set of logical rules; I know that because of my drivers ed. It shouldn’t be something that people get wrong. And it’s just one thing people might understand better if they had gone through drivers ed. Driving isn’t hard, necessarily: there are just a lot of rules that need to be followed to keep everyone safe. If everyone learned these rules thoroughly, a lot less people would die. For example, I recently was driving down a busy street in my city, and I watched two cars collide because someone didn’t signal they were changing lanes. The light turned red, so I had to sit and listen to people frantically call an ambulance. I don’t know if anyone died––it’s possible––but it would have been so easy for that accident not to happen. Someone just didn’t know the rules very well.
Therefore, I think everyone should be required to do drivers ed. I think ensuring people are taught rules could greatly reduce the risk of car crashes and death; if someone had just known who had the right of way, my mom wouldn’t be injured. If someone had known how to signal correctly, that crash wouldn’t have happened. People need to be taught.
That’s why I still go through my rule books as a new driver to refresh myself; I genuinely think drivers ed benefited me because it made me aware of what went wrong in these crashes. By going over the manuals I have at home, I am constantly assured I can identify what happened and prevent myself from causing a crash. Being a responsible driver, in my opinion, means educating yourself.