Safety

Safety

Driving has been a serious issue for me since before I could even drive for myself. I’ve always known that the way my dad drives is dangerous, especially due to the number of close calls that we’ve been in while he was the one behind the wheel. The realities of how dangerous driving can be really hit me back in 2012 when one of my second cousins died in an accident at the age of sixteen and again in 2019 when a friend of mine died when she was only eighteen. Safe driving is a topic that is incredibly important for me for a number of reasons, and I do my best to be a safe driver when I myself am driving.

I do believe that driver education plays an important role in keeping people safe. You can talk until you’re blue in the face when trying to tell someone to be safe, but if they don’t know what that means, they aren’t going to be safe. Driving is something that we all take for granted because we do it every single day. We tend to forget how dangerous it is to be going at high speeds in a big metal death box. If we do not take the conscious effort to make sure that we are being safe, we are not going to be safe. It’s something we do every day, so how dangerous can it really be? At least, that’s what our minds do. However, we can counteract this by teaching people about the very real dangers of driving and telling the stories of those who have lost friends or family to motor accidents.

With that in mind, there are a number of things that we as individual drivers can do to do our part to keep ourselves, our passengers, and other people on the road safe. The first thing is limiting distractions. In today’s age, there are more distractions than ever. We have computers small enough to fit in our pockets that have everything on them. Everything from texts from our best friends to the latest celebrity gossip and anything else we might want to look through while we’re bored (and driving, especially long distances) can get boring. Something that I do to prevent myself from being distracted with my phone is I usually put my phone in my passenger seat, where it usually falls to the floor, so it is out of easy reach. That way, even trying to grab my phone is a dangerous act that I shouldn’t be doing, keeping the reminder there that I shouldn’t go after it. Nothing on a phone is more important than my life or anyone else’s life. Another thing that I do is I am always wearing my seatbelt, no matter how long the drive is. Seatbelts not only protect you, but if you are in the back seat, they also protect the person in front of you. I’ve read somewhere that if the person behind you isn’t wearing a seatbelt and you were to get into a crash, the velocity of their body could seriously injure or even kill you. Seatbelts are a very important safety measure that is often ignored just because they’re uncomfortable. I do think that there is another thing that can help keep people safe. That is making sure all drivers keep their knowledge of the road up to date. I will admit, I know I have forgotten a lot of the information that I was taught in drivers education almost six years ago and a lot of it has to do with safe driving. Every law is put into place for a reason, and that is to keep everyone safe. I think that if we would have to take a test every time we get our licenses renewed on the laws of the road, everyone would be much better off. It would force everyone to keep the laws of the road at least mostly fresh in their mind rather than taking the one test at sixteen and then dropping the knowledge completely.

Despite the precautions that any individual might take, they still run the risk of having a dangerous driver every time they allow someone else to drive. I am no stranger to dangerous drivers. My father is one of the most dangerous drivers that I know. He has a need for speed that never seems to be satisfied (though with how many speeding tickets he has gotten, one would think he would try to slow down). He gets bored easily and turns to his phone (and has been known to put a show or sports game on it and put it in the windshield where he can watch it). If music is playing that he loves, he gets so distracted by it that he doesn’t even watch the road much for the duration of the song. It is incredibly scary to drive with him every single time he’s behind the wheel and I am constantly terrified that one of these days, something is going to happen to him. The same thing goes for one of my best friends. Every time I’ve ridden in the car with him, he’s done something incredibly stupid, like trying to make a turn into a parking lot at fifty miles an hour, weaving in and out of traffic, and texting and driving (including texting in our group chat, even after I’ve told him not to do that). I have also had the misfortune of witnessing a car hitting a motorcycle. Luckily, the biker was alright and managed to make it out of the crash with few injuries, but it was scary for those first few minutes while we were trying to decide if he was ok because he’d been knocked out.

Driving is an incredibly dangerous activity that we forget is dangerous simply due to the fact that we do it every day. Every day, someone somewhere is killed on the road. We need to do everything that we possibly can in order to make the roads as safe as possible and try to prevent these sorts of accidents. This can be on the state or national level with stricter laws, or it can be on the individual level with more caution and care individual drivers put into their driving abilities. In most cases, car accidents are preventable. We just have to do our part to make sure as few of them happen as possible.