Speeding for Safety

I am usually the last person to preach safe driving habits. My friends and family can attest that when they tell me to slow down or that my music is too loud, I always shrug it off. Thankfully, for my own safety and the safety of those around me, my perspective was changed drastically just a few short weeks ago. The real fear that I experienced is what had the power to make me a safer driver. I believe that incorporating real life experiences into driver’s education will help new drivers to become much safer once they are finally on the roads and in unpredictable situations .

Almost two years ago I took my driver’s education course. I learned about traffic rules, left hand turns, and what to do when the road is foggy. Yet despite their best efforts, I didn’t understand the importance of following speed limits. Although I was taught that over 30% of all fatal crashes among drivers my age are solely because of speeding and that my age group speeds so much more compared to any other, I never understood the true weight of these numbers.. The lectures and statistics about how many people died in driving accidents never felt real. The jokes and the fun that my friends and I had were more important to me than the severe danger I should’ve known we were in. Despite consistently going at least ten miles over the speed limit, I was never pulled over.

However, a few weeks ago, my lucky streak ended. Going 63 miles per hour in a 45 mile-per-hour zone on my way to work, I suddenly heard sirens whooping behind me, and noticed red and blue lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I felt as though my heart had jumped into my throat. A policeman gestured for me to pull over. He was kind because he could tell that I was terrified and explained to me how to pay the fine for the ticket. The rest of my drive to work was spent anxiously worrying about how fast I was going. My entire shift was spent replaying all of the moments before, reliving the times when I’d had to slam on my breaks to avoid hitting someone because of how fast I’d been going, wondering just how many times I had narrowly avoided being in a terrible wreck. I was distracted all day long.

When I finally clocked out at dusk, I had to turn on my headlights because without them I would have barely been able to see anything. What they illuminated, however, was the final step in shifting my perspective: three police cars with their sirens blaring blocked the road. As I slowed down and began to turn around, my headlights illuminated the car that had driven into a lamppost, seemingly going far above the speed limit judging by the fact that the entire hood of the car was caved in with a pool of blood right next to it. My breath hitched as I realized: that was the fate that had awaited me if I had never been pulled over. I was one of the incredibly lucky ones. Realizing the importance of safe driving only cost me a one hundred and thirty dollar fine while it cost many others the lives of their friends and family.

So many people my age never learn the importance of driving cautiously because they aren’t lucky enough to get a ticket. The current system of driver’s education is not effective enough to ingrain the practice of following speed limits into our driving habits. It teaches us how to drive sufficiently and prepares us for every situation, but it does not scare us into acting on the information that we possess. Though it may seem gruesome, the reality of unsafe driving must be shown before students start driving on their own. This can be achieved through real life accounts of horrific things seen on the roads, hearing from survivors of accidents caused by speeding or other preventable habits, or an addition to the physical driving test where students are pulled over and learn what to do in that situation. Many may protest that this would be too much for students to handle or too scarring for them to see. However, having to experience those life-threatening crashes in real life is far more traumatizing than learning about them in a classroom setting ever could be. Fear has been proven to be linked to better memory, with people remembering more details from frightening situations. Fear, therefore, can be the most beneficial emotion when used to inspire safe habits. This is how we prevent those crashes from happening and how we keep the roads safe.