Stress-Sweat: The “Driver’s Education” Question

I am a relatively young dad (39) with young adult male children of driving age (21 and 17). I am split between the dad’s perspective and the young adult’s perspective. The father in me says. “Make them sit in a class and learn about how dangerous driving can be. Then send them out and have some else take them through the freeway onramp fiasco! I’ll gladly pay.” Then the young person in me says my guys are thinking, “Now I have to go sit in a class that feels like it’s out of the 1950s and then go out with another dude that stinks like coffee and stress-sweat for a ride in a car with two steering wheels.” So, as a young dad with resources that happens to be a combat veteran, I did some proper peer-reviewed research into the “driver education question.” This research was important to me because my oldest has had an accident recently, and I have had a young person in my life die due to reckless driving. After researching this essay and experiencing devastating vehicle accidents, I have steps delineated to be a better and safer driver and help others become safer on the road.

First, I have to point out the statistics on the DMV scholarship website because I am a combat veteran who lost friends in war. The website states, “driving is more dangerous and deadly for our nation than being involved in combat” (dmvedu.org). This statement is misleading. I found the following:

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2013, the U.S had a total of 212,159,728 drivers. Of those, 32,719 Died of a car accident. That comes out to a percentage of deaths per driving population of .00015%.

 

The U.S. Defense Casualty Analysis System states that there was a total of 1,732,632 service people at the beginning of the Iraq war, and the total deaths were 1,399 that year. The deaths of U.S. service members as a percent of those serving (year 2004) was .001%, roughly 67 times the number of deaths caused by driving in the driving population. 

The scholarship website compares potatoes to tomatoes—the statistics quoted may rhyme, but they do not mean the same thing. This is not to say that driving cannot be dangerous. Two weeks after my son’s licensure, he picked his brother up from a friend’s house after dark. In getting out of the parking lot, in a straight driveway, his “foot slipped,” and he ended up destroying a brick wall and a new car. And, a few months before that, my nephew-in-law took his Camaro on the highway and crashed into a Semi-truck, killing him instantly. His name was Victor Nava, and he was a sponsored, up-and-coming skateboarder with the world’s future ahead of him.

So, what steps can you take to be a better and safer driver and help others become safer on the road? First, we can begin by being less naïve about the sophistication of our young people. They can do the math, and they can smell the misrepresentation of facts. The last thing we want to do as educators and parents is to have them dismiss our good advice about driving because we did some creative statistical handiwork with a number as sacrosanct as American deaths in war.

This brings me to the second point I have to discuss, the efficacy of driver education. In my investigation, I found the following about the “Dekalb County Project,”—one of the most extensive investigations into the effectiveness of driver education. “The findings have been extremely consistent and disappointing to the driver education community: driver education was not found to be associated with reliable or significant decreases in crash involvement’ (Mayhew). In addition, the paper quotes other driver’s education programs in other countries that were just as futile. 

Allan Williams, Ph.D., in his paper “Earning a License,” agrees with the lack of efficacy of driver’s ed to mitigate risk and discusses the graduated system,

“These are the core features of a graduated system. An ideal system will start the process at age 16 and not allow graduation until age 18, will set a minimum learner’s period of 6 to 12 months and an intermediate license stage of one year or more, and will have restrictions on late-night driving and transporting teenage passengers, the two main risk factors for young beginners. Graduated systems directly address the experience issue, phasing in full-privilege driving by controlling exposure to progressively more difficult driving experiences. This allows for the accumulation of experience with lower risk, on-road driving” (Williams).

In conjunction with a graduated system, I suggest a driver sponsorship program where an experienced driver in the new driver’s life takes ownership of the driving education experience in conjunction with standard driver’s education. 

Second, to make driving safer for all in general, we have to bolster environmental controls that engineer a safer driving experience. According to a paper on “the impact of policy, environmental, and educational intervention,” “death rates over time have declined because both the environment (e.g., safer roadways, improved signage, increased availability of vehicles) and human behavior (e.g., using child safety seats, seat belts, reductions in drinking and driving, and purchasing cars with higher safety ratings) have occurred in response to changing policies and public awareness (Geilen). In this way, we take the choice of being safe away from the driver and make the driving experience safer for all.

Steps mentioned previously to reduce the number of driving deaths include changing our social norms about the education of new drivers. The era of “Scared Straight” is over and has been proven to be ineffective. So as people who care about our new drivers, we have to spend time behind the wheel in conjunction with their driver’s education. To conclude, driving is dangerous, although it is not as dangerous a ratio as joining the armed forces in a time of war. More people drive than go to war. Therefore, precautions have to be taken for the safety of all. We engineered safety precautions in our everyday actions in the Army so we would not have to think about being safe in times of emergency. If we take like precautions in the training of drivers, maybe we will save ourselves some stress-sweat.

Works Cited

Administration,https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter4.cfm

DCAS Reports – Active Duty Military Death Rates per 100,000 Serving, https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_number_serve.xhtml.

Gielen, Andrea C., and Lawrence W. Green. “The Impact of Policy, Environmental, and Educational Interventions: A Synthesis of the Evidence From Two Public Health Success Stories.” Health Education & Behavior, vol. 42, Sage Publications, Inc., 2015, pp. 20S-34S, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45088238.

“Highway Finance Data Collection.” U.S. Department of Transportation/Federal Highway

“Licensed Drivers.” Licensed Drivers | Bureau of Transportation Statistics, https://www.bts.gov/content/licensed-drivers.

Mayhew, Daniel R., et al. “Effectiveness and Role of Driver Education and Training in a Graduated Licensing System.” Journal of Public Health Policy, vol. 19, no. 1, Palgrave Macmillan Journals, 1998, pp. 51–67, https://doi.org/10.2307/3343089.

Research Note: 2013 Motor Vehicle Crashes … – Transportation. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812101.

Schaeffer, Katherine. “The Changing Face of America’s Veteran Population.” PewResearch Center, Pew Research Center, 5 Apr. 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/05/the-changing-face-of-americas-veteran-population/.

Williams, Allan F. “Earning a Driver’s License.” Public Health Reports (1974-), vol. 112, no. 6, Association of Schools of Public Health, 1997, pp. 452–61, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4598187.