The importance of driver education

The importance of driver education by Alexia Pereira

My family and I were driving around the tourist places in Rio de Janeiro by car. It was a sunny afternoon, and I wanted to visit the most famous museum in the city: Tomorrow’s Museum.

As I live far from my grandmother, I sat close to her, talking about all the sections we would see when we got there. The car was full, with my little brother by my side, my dad in the co-driver seat, and my uncle as the driver.

At the beginning of the trip, I did not notice anything different. I was focusing on the exciting talk with my grandma. Suddenly, I felt a hard push. My uncle had stopped the car, in the middle of the road.

There was another car in front of us, and for 05 centimeters we had not had a terrible car accident. We all got worried but decided to move on our trip.

However, when we got into the crowded streets of downtown, my uncle kept zig-zagging through traffic. He started complaining about the commuting time, and the car was almost crushing in others. Looking at his way to drive, I was overwhelmed, with my heart racing, afraid of the possibility of an accident.

Suddenly, he stopped in front of the semaphore. In the five minutes we spent waiting for it opens, I started feeling better. I took a deep breath and talked to my grandmother to distract myself. However, that moment did not last too much. When the semaphore opened again, he took his smartphone out of his pocket and started texting his wife while driving. I closed my eyes in the hope we would get there as soon as possible.

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On that day, my family and I did not have an accident due to luck. My uncle did not only put our family in danger but also put the other people in traffic. That story could have finished a lot worse.

Unfortunately, there are many drivers like him. This is the reality for many families. As analyzed by a study developed by the Brazilian national traffic department, 94% of traffic accidents happen due to the combination of smartphones, driving, and recklessness. Each year, thousands of lives face a terrific experience I almost did.

A considerable amount of these people can suffer great damage because of the impact of an accident. It can get to death. Impacted by my own experience, I studied ways to reduce this condition and improved possible approaches.

According to some Brazilian researchers, the most future way to avoid traffic accidents is by using GPS inside the drivers’ smartphone. This function would measure the speed throughout the trajectory of the user. Once it indicates a velocity above walking, the tool would block texting and social media notifications. Instead, it would only show a message on the lock and home screen:

”The social activity has been blocked for Overspeed.”

The only function permitted while driving in case of an accident of some danger related would be the emergency contacts.

Once the user returns to the permitted speed, the messages and social media come back to normal, and the GPS would inform the user in notifications:

“The social activity has been allowed for returning to safe speed”.

Besides this tool, I thought about focusing on the car itself. Nowadays, every car has a multimedia center used for radio, music, GPS, etc. That is where the approach goes for. My suggestion is that once the driver buys the car, it asks for the phone number of the main user, to unlock the vehicle. Once settled, the vehicle has permission to block the cellphone texting and social media functions. In this way, the incoming messages are stored in the cloud.

Again, the driver has access to emergency contacts only. After commuting, messages are sent to the phone.

It is not only by adding new tools that we can make the traffic safer. We should also improve the resources and tools we already have. Nowadays, people want to become drivers due to their mobility and independence. For being a legal driver, everybody had to take their license. There is where we should improve.

Thus, while taking their driver’s license, students could have an extensive speech about the damages caused by the lack of driver education. Those methods if completed correctly, would provide a safer road for everybody. As a result, the rate of deaths caused by car accidents would decrease.

Using these approaches, the drivers will have their attention exclusively on driving safely. So the next families tourists’ trips will be only for fun.