Caring Enough to Drive Well

Driving is one of the most dangerous things that most Americans will ever do. Skiing, snowboarding, and skydiving can be considered safe activities when compared to the potentially deadly act of simply driving a car. Every year, thousands upon thousands of people die from traffic-related fatalities. Why do people not seem to care if driving claims so many lives? Irresponsible driving is prevalent and arguably more common than responsible driving, and something must change!

For many years, my older brother would drive me around town, and I learned a lot from how he drove! My brother was not a safe driver in any sense of the word. He would fly around corners and nose through traffic, almost always going ten miles over the speed limit. He would often text people and adjust the music on his phone while he drove. Amazingly, he never got in an accident while I rode with him, which is certainly not a testament to his driving abilities. I wish that my brother would have cared more about the people around him and paid more attention to what he was taught in driver’s education. If he had applied himself to being a safe driver, I would have felt safer when I rode with him.

Educating drivers is one of the most important investments our country can make. Every year, thousands of Americans die from traffic-related fatalities. Many of these fatalities would have been prevented if proper driving skills had been applied. Driver’s education is essential to helping all drivers learn safety skills for three reasons: vehicles are complicated machines, interacting with others on the road is a unique and non-intuitive system of interactions, and distracted driving can kill any talented driver.

Driver’s education is critical for the safety of the driver and passengers because vehicles are complicated machines to use. I have been a driver for a little over two years now, but I can still easily recall the frustration of learning to operate such a large and complicated machine as a car. There are many nuances to driving a vehicle, and driver’s education familiarizes drivers with operating a vehicle and helps them form lasting habits that allow them to drive safely. Without this learning process, the safety of student drivers is simply left to chance.

Interactions on the road are not easy to learn, and miscommunications and lack of knowledge lead to many accidents, fatal and otherwise. Driving communication skills are almost entirely learned from taking a driver’s education course, highlighting how important it is. There are many different things that a driver must watch for, and they must know how to respond to these events accordingly. If young drivers do not know how to handle complex scenarios before they get on the road, it is only a matter of time before they wreck, potentially hurting or killing others and themselves.

Distracted driving is one of the biggest problems that today’s drivers face, and driver’s education helps warn people about the dangers of driving distracted. Even before the invention of the smartphone, there were many things to keep the driver’s focus off the road. Loud friends or children, food or drink, and figuring out directions are ways that drivers can be distracted without their smartphones. Nowadays, things have only gotten worse; nearly everyone does something on their phone while driving, be it texting, putting on music, looking up directions, or some other activity. Smartphones are practically made to distract drivers, and they lead to thousands of deaths every year. Driver’s education helps face this problem by teaching drivers how dangerous distracted driving is.

In summary, I consider driver’s education to be invaluable. It teaches students how to actually manage a vehicle, how to interact with others on the road, and why habits like texting while driving are so dangerous. However, if so many students receive a driver’s education course, why are there still so many car accidents that come from human error? The problem is not with the driver’s education course but with the fact that some people simply do not care about others enough to put safety principles into practice. My brother is, unfortunately, an excellent example. He took a driver’s education course and even attended a defensive driving course, but he was still careless in his driving. He was not rational enough to realize that his irresponsible driving could kill someone and that he would be solely to blame. The first step we need to take to become safe drivers is to care enough to put safe driving practices above all else. Once this happens, driving can become a safe activity for all.