Road Safety for Everyone

Joshua O’Meara

dmvedu.org Scholarship Application

9 July 2021

Road Safety for Everyone

Today I saw a sign on Highway 50 that read, “3680 deaths on this highway in 2021.” I was shocked by that number, and deeply concerned. The reality is driving is very dangerous and often deadly, but everybody drives everywhere every day. According to dmvedu.org, approximately 34,000 people die per year in America due to a car crash (dmvedu.org, 2021). I started looking into driver education to determine a solution for this problem. There are many ways that we as a society can make driving safer, from advancing technology in cars to improving law enforcement, but ultimately there is only one solution: better education for all drivers. The education system for drivers in America currently is too lax and allows people who are not completely adequate drivers to obtain a license without reaching the highest safety standard. To close the gap between the current system and where it should be requires three steps: a more rigorous and extensive driver’s ed course, more time required behind the wheel with an instructor, and frequent, consistent routine re-certification tests to refresh the driver’s memory and ensure that they are still a safe driver.

Currently, in California, a person must go through the following steps to obtain a valid license. If the person is under eighteen years old, they must take an instructional road safety course to obtain a provisional instruction permit. Then, they must take six hours of professional driving training, and do fifty hours of practice with an adult over the next six months. At that point, they can take a drive test with a DMV examiner, on which they can miss up to fifteen points. If they are over eighteen years old, they do not need to take the course to obtain an instruction permit, they must simply pass a knowledge test. They then follow the same requirements as those under eighteen: fifty hours of driving practice and the same exam. The main difference here is that if a person is over eighteen, they do not have to take driver’s ed. Any person once they have passed these tests is a valid licensed driver in the state of California and does not have to retest until they are considered a senior at seventy years old.

There are a few problems with this system. Firstly, it does not adequately educate drivers from the start. While the majority of drivers today start the process of obtaining a license while still in high school and thus are required to take driver’s ed, plenty of people still wait until after they are eighteen. Additionally, driver’s ed does not contain all of the necessary information for road safety. It’s a very cursory education and only really captures the highlights. There isn’t much info included about the dangers involved with driving, so it’s too easy to blow it off and not take it seriously. I admit that many of my friends and I simply logged into the website and clicked through the pages without really reading them, taking and passing the test without having absorbed all of the information. And since I haven’t been tested on it since then, I’ve forgotten almost all of it. The second problem with this system is the drive test. While the test itself is certainly rigorous enough, it does not and cannot cover every aspect of adequate driving skill. There are many skills like parallel parking and proper hill descent techniques that are not tested. Additionally, since it is only required once, drivers can develop bad habits after the test that may go unchecked for the rest of their lives (or at least until they become senior citizens).

There is one thing in common with both of these problems: the driving learning process happens when you first get your license and isn’t tested again until the driver turns seventy. And if the testing isn’t adequate from the start, drivers are truly being set up for failure. No wonder driving is so deadly; the safety standards for drivers are not high enough. However, there is a solution. First, the driver’s education course must be extremely more comprehensive and rigorous and required for everyone. And to solve the second problem, the drive test must become more comprehensive and rigorous, and routinely re-tested.

Driver’s ed is most often completed by students in high school. So, why not incorporate the class into public high schools? By offering a driver’s ed class to high school juniors and seniors, schools would be able to spend more time and go into greater detail about every aspect of road safety. Students would be challenged more and given more resources to explore the subject of driving, while also receiving a high school credit to put towards their diploma. For people over eighteen wishing to obtain a driver’s license, a similar program should be set up at junior colleges, so that everybody can learn about the dangers of driving and how to avoid them. In this way, every person with a driver’s license would be adequately educated on proper road safety.

Once each person has completed their driver’s education course and undergone professional road instruction and practice hours, they would be able to take a drive test. This would be very similar to how the DMV currently operates drive tests but would incorporate more practice on local driving skills. In a city, for example, the drivers must prove their adequacy in parallel parking. In the countryside, maybe they would need to demonstrate how to avoid animal collisions with safe evasive maneuvers. The tests would be closer to an hour in length and would involve driving on a mix of all the local roads, including highways, city intersections, countryside dirt roads, etc. The examiner must thoroughly determine that the driver can handle the car safely and does not pose a threat to themselves or other drivers. Then, every five years, when it is time for each driver to renew their license, they must take an abbreviated version of both the written test and the drive test to determine that they are still able to handle a car safely and do not pose a threat to themselves or other drivers.

With this two-step solution in place, I believe that every driver would be equipped with the knowledge and skills to be safe on the road, and maintain that same standard of safety years after initially obtaining a license. With a more rigorous driving education system incorporated in high schools and junior colleges, students will be given more resources and educated more thoroughly than they are currently. A more rigorous and thorough drive test ensures that drivers are able to perform the skills necessary to drive in their environments. Routine re-testing requires drivers to maintain the same level of safety that they learned initially and prevents them from developing bad driving habits. Overall, this system provides for an optimal learning experience and prevents traffic casualties by promoting road safety for everyone.

References

dmvedu.org. (2021). Driver Education Initiative Award – Annual Scholarship Opportunity. https://www.dmvedu.org/scholarship/.

dmv.ca.gov. (2021). Driver’s Licenses. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification-cards/driver-licenses-dl/.