My Ticket to Education

My Ticket to Education

On a quiet little Sunday morning close to nine years ago, I was called into work to make some last-minute preparations for a trade show presentation that my team would be needing the next week. I jumped into my shiny new Camaro, engine roaring to life, and headed out on what should have been a ten-minute drive down the highway and into our corporate parking lot. Traffic was non-existent and the ample speed limit of 65 mph should have been enough to satisfy my boyish need for speed. However, upon passing a blacked-out SUV, I decided to show off all my Camaro’s horsepower and accelerated her hard. To my surprise, the SUV in my rearview mirror was not growing smaller but rather larger and by the time I was hitting 110 mph he was hitting his blue and red lights. Busted! While I am sure he was well within his duties as an undercover officer of the law to impound my car and arrest me on the spot, I instead received a very steep (yet reduced) ticket and sent on my way. I would soon enroll in one of the many online driving schools and make one of the biggest realizations I have ever had since I received my license. Namely, I had forgotten most of the rules of the road!

To be clear, I did not need driving school to know that travelling 110 mph on a highway was both illegal and dangerous. The prominently posted white and black signs along highways and roadways are nearly impossible to miss. What I did discover was that aside from the basics of driving on American roads, e.g., solid yellow line denote lanes, red is stop/green is go, etc…, the many nuances of operating a motor vehicle had been quickly memorized by 16 year old me to pass a driving test and then just as quickly forgotten. I was reading the material and watching the videos as though it were the first time I had seen them at all. And why not? While driving was something I did everyday it was not my livelihood and thus my experiences behind the steering wheel of my many cars were limited in scope and the rules had, over time, been over-simplified by my cognitive functions. Suddenly, my now adult brain was understanding and categorizing the rules and laws I was reading about merging into traffic or yielding to oncoming traffic in a crowded residential neighborhood with street parking. More than visualizing the rules and how they would apply, this time, and for the first time, I cared.

Since taking that online driving course, my driving has vastly improved, even nine years later, and my proof is a clean driving record and zero accidents. However, even I don’t believe that is going far enough. I know the effects of time on the memory and how confidence in our own abilities can lull us into a false sense of security. I believe that successfully passing a driver training course once every ten years should be part of the process to maintain a driver license in the U.S. Studies have shown that memory works on a “use-it-or-lose-it” basis and this is more than apparent to anyone who has been on a morning commute with someone bearing down on your rear bumper so close, their headlights are no longer visible. Or caught in a bumper-to-bumper traffic delay because almost two hours ago someone slammed their brakes and created an invisible stop sign that has continued to propagate as a result of not maintaining safe distance. These examples are but minor annoyances in our daily commutes; however, if re-education can prevent these small predicaments then how much more can that knowledge save lives? I posit that a fresh reminder of one’s loss of motor functions for every few ounces of hard liquor consumed is going to mean more at twenty-six and thirty-six then sixteen when you feel invincible and rebellious. Thus, preventing themselves or even just as importantly, a friend, from driving impaired and putting lives at risk. Most, if not all, young people have taken this foolhardy risk, believing ourselves to be invulnerable and sadly many are still paying the price in death and incarceration for not taking their education seriously at a time in their lives when they take nothing seriously.

I strongly urge our states’ Departments of Motor Vehicles to consider adding a requirement of successfully passing an online driver training school as a mandatory requirement for renewing a driver license at least once every ten years. It will refresh driver’s memories, remind them of rules of the road they have either forgotten or over-simplified, and coincide with the driver’s own maturing process and be taken more seriously each time resulting in fewer lives being needlessly lost to ignorance and reckless behavior behind the wheel. Nine years ago, my poor choices led me to receiving a ticket which brought me to a place of being better educated. It is very likely that education was my ticket to being alive today.