Drivers Ed online Scholarship Essay

Drivers Ed Online Scholarship Essay

William Meyers

It can be difficult to try and convince people that what they do on a daily basis, is the leading cause of death for their age group, and why wouldn’t it be? I drive to work, the store and run small errands almost every day, logging maybe an hour of driving daily, and I have only been in two minor rear end accidents, both at red lights. Because of that, humans regularly block out things like statistics as something that probably will not happen to them, and that is a natural response to fear and danger. Our brain simply filters out that type of fear because living in fear of a statistic is unhealthy, and we consider anyone who does to have a problem. So, how do we educate not only youth, but everyone up to the age of 54, that a car accident is the leading cause of death for their age group?

One would be education. After I got my drivers license and graduated high school, I never heard one more statistic on the dangers of driving and road safety, mostly because I do not have cable or watch the news. But if we are expecting people below the age of 30 to watch the news, and actually retain it, we are fooling ourselves. The better way to pursue education is by targeting short, informative advertisements on platforms where younger people of driving age spend their time, which is sites like YouTube, Instagram and snapchat. I remember when PBS had various public service announcements and some commercials were sponsored by various groups who wanted to promote public education on certain topics. I do not believe it is a stretch to try that model, for things like YouTube and snapchat, that already have many sponsored ads. For example, a specific YouTuber whose channel is primarily targeted to the teenager and young adult audience, can be approached with an advertising deal, and can be asked to take less money than average for an ad on their channel, in exchange for the positive publicity of helping to reduce traffic fatalities.

Another strategy would be to target what causes most accidents, and that is distracted driving, in its many forms. These days, it is hard not to look at your phone while driving, maybe you stuck in traffic, or a friend or family member is texting you about stopping at the store before you get home, both are understandable, and most people have been in those situations. What I propose is not to outright say “never look at your phone” because most people do, even when we know it is wrong, so we change the habits toward hands free devices, which still put you at risk, but far less so than using one hand and to look at a phone instead of the road. With advancements in speech to text technology, like Siri or Alexa, you can talk to your phone, and there is a large selection of items that can enable you to do it more easily, because not everyone can afford a car that does it for you, but things like Bitty Boomers, or their equivalents, are small speaker/mics that are only a few inches in diameter, and usually cost around 20 USD. They can enable anyone with a phone to speak and listen to their phone through that device without taking their eyes off the road or their hands off the wheel. So, when your mom calls and asks you to stop by the store before you get home, you can simply tell your phone to answer the call, and speak to your mother through the speaker device, and the same can be said about texts, since almost all phones these days have text to speech.

Lastly, and probably most difficult to implement properly, would be continuing education for all drivers, well after they get their license. While this is already a plan with traffic school when someone gets traffic citations, those tend to be far and few between, seen as an inconvenience at best and therefore not taken very seriously and not everyone who gets into severe vehicle accidents have a history of citations and haven been required to attend traffic school. I believe certain government financial incentives can be used to encourage voluntary participation in traffic school. Car registration fees for example, could be waived or reduced if the driver had been to traffic school since the last registration, discounts on automotive insurance, or certain subsidies for car maintenance for people who can not afford them, like needing tire replacements for $800 when it is already hard enough to keep an income during the lockdowns. These costs, while not cheap on a large scale, might be cheaper than the $871 billion dollars lost every year due to vehicle accidents, and even if it is the same, at least saving lives, instead of wheeling away victims, would be far more worth it.

We will never be able to fully eliminate distracted driving or vehicle accidents, just like we can not foresee a time when starvation, cancer or all manner of senseless deaths can be stopped, but we can reduce them. We should as a community work to make people more aware of not only the statistics, but their own natural instincts to filter out danger but instead always be aware that it can happen to you.