Driver’s Education

To Whom It May Concern,

It is extremely important that every individual takes a driver’s education course. My son was going through driver’s training directly before the pandemic hit. Due to the virus, the state of Wisconsin decided that any person currently enrolled in driver’s education, was not required to take a road test, and was not required to finish driver’s training with their instructor. Family was enough. This was and is still not okay. Driver’s training teaches people the importance of paying attention on the road. The trainees are required to watch videos of what can happen if they are texting or talking on their phones. Those videos alone are shocking enough for most people to understand the importance of paying attention to avoid hitting and killing a pedestrian. While my son is a pretty good driver, not every teenager has a family that has the time to teach the importance of driving on the road. I see more and more, “kids” everyday that are texting on their phone while driving, and not just at a stop light. I see people driving everyday that have their phones in cradle to the left or right of the steering wheel, but are watching movies, or YouTube videos.

Taking steps to reduce the number of deaths is a hard concept. Most states have laws against being on the phone at all whiles driving. What we really need to be doing, is having the parents as well as teachers and driver’s training educators express the importance of not only taking a human life, but the possibility of losing your own life, and facing prison time for deaths related to driving while not paying attention. The law doesn’t seem to be enough. I believe that we also need more police on the roads enforcing these laws. This is difficult however, due to the national staff shortage everywhere. Including the police departments across the country.

I was in a car accident in October 2020. We were hit head on by a 19-year-old who was texting on her phone. She totaled her vehicle, and cost $13,000 in damage, as well as a year’s worth of medical bills for me. The total amount came to over, $65,000 since my insurance required that her insurance paid the bills. It created spine issues for me. According to the police officer, this was not the girls first accident caused by distracted driving. In fact, this was her 5^th incident of distracted driving that caused an accident. The officer told us that she would definitely not have a drivers license after this one due to the nature of the accident.

My mother does not pay attention while driving. She is on her phone often and is too often more buys sightseeing than driving. There was an incident on a road trip her and I took recently, where we were high up in the New Mexico mountains, and I had to grab the steering wheel to the left so that we did not fly down to the bottom of the mountains never to be seen again. I forced her to stop the vehicle, and I took over driving for the remainder of the trip. Our family since has had an intervention for her. People do not like to be told that they, “don’t know how to drive,” but when it comes to the safety of someone, family and friends need to speak up. My mother is a wonderful person. She does a lot for her community, and genuinely cares about everyone that walks our planet. However, it took this road trip, and the intervention provided, for her to realize that she could harm someone else or herself, and that if she did, she could end up in prison due to distracted driving. These are things people do not think about, because “I only read the text,” or, “It was just a few seconds.” It is unfortunately typically only a few seconds that it takes for that distracted driver to hit someone and kill them.

With all the technology we have available today, we need to have devices in every car that even just alert the police if distracted driving is happening. There could be some sort of function to even slow down or stop the car completely. Unfortunately, we cannot rely on humans to obey the law. Education is extremely important though and can help to reduce the number of deaths on the road. The police have had radars for decades to catch speeders. I wonder if there’s also something we can add with our advanced technology, that would be able to decipher if a person is texting on their phone or not.