The Importance of Drivers Ed

How driver education reduces driver deaths: Teaching people how to properly drive is the best way to prevent unnecessary deaths, of course no matter how well you teach you can’t avoid the drunk driving accident, the people who are otherwise intoxified making decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make. However it will help prevent the amount of red lights run, people using the wrong lane, and the confusion in a round-about. Driver education teaches the proper sign vocabulary, which can help people know if they should slow down on a curve; possibly preventing cars rolling off cliffs, drivers losing control, drifting, rear endings, and impromptu braking. Driver education is especially important to teenagers as young drivers who have not completed driver’s education are 75% more likely to get a traffic ticket, 24% more likely to be involved in a fatal or injury accident and 16% more likely to have an accident in general.

Steps can be taken to reduce deaths: Avoid distracted driving as much as possible, this may sound like a no brainer, but more things are a distraction than they seem to be. I noticed that once I started listening to music on radio more I started to drive one handed more as I was always changing the stations on the radio, trying to find a good song. Small things like trinkets in your car can be distracting, having a window open, having friends in the car, a phone, bag, or book that’s not secured properly so it keeps falling, a water bottle left in the back of the car, even having low gas or a smelly car can be distractions. Another way to help reduce a lot of deaths would be to increase lighting on signage, or better sign placement. At my school we have a one way path, however the signage around there is terrible and it isn’t very clear that it’s a one way as there’s no sign saying wrong way or one way at all and the arrows on the road haven been repaired since the building was made in 1965. A lot of crushes and confusion happen in that particular area due to this.

Experiences in car accidents/ irresponsible driving: My dad had many car accidents in his life, he’s what my mom calls a “site sewer” he often pays more attention to the scenery than the things in front of him. Plus he has a bad habit of telling people no, so he often answers the phone while driving and will talk with the person on the other line for a while because most of his calls are from his work. But only one of those accidents was ever good enough to completely wreck a car, it was about 10-15 years ago and my dad was going up to Mohawk, Oregon to visit my sisters (we live in Eugene, Oregon) and it was a particularly cold winter. The car we had at the time was a big white truck and he was going up an icy hill that he had been up thousands of times before in the same weather conditions, however this time was different as the tires, instead of gripping the ice, slid. And my dad started sliding back down the hill, the car was spinning and gaining speed as it traveled down the hill, but my dad did as he remembered and kept the wheel straight and did not slam on the brakes. My dad did end up surviving, however the car did not, the final outcome of the spinning leading the car to slam front first into a tree and completely destroy the engine and whole front hood area.

Steps I can take to be a safer driver/tips to other drivers: I would say pay attention, cause I often get distracted by the rear view mirror, when someone is riding up my bumper or when I get curious if someone will actually merge when they have the opportunity to. I also have a bunch of stuffed animals in my car (none of them block my vision) but the rat stuffed animals I have in the back are standing and are only attached to my car by their feet so when I have by back windows all the way down they will wobble a lot and I worry they will fall out. And while I make sure to tell any passengers riding in the back to only roll the window down halfway before we get on the road, some people tend to forget after a while so when there are passages in the back I often have to watch and make sure my rats aren’t going out the window.