What You Can Do to Help the Battle for Safe Driving

With each passing year, millions upon millions of people unfortunately lose their lives on the road across the world. Approximately 1.35 million people lose their lives on the road worldwide, with 38,000 of those being from the United States (“Road Safety Facts”). In accidents alone, there are 6 million per year in our nation, with over 50% of those accidents resulting in injuries that are serious to the extent of requiring medical attention (“Car Accident Statistics”; “Road Safety Facts”). These easily preventable tragedies in no way whatsoever need to happen. It is easy to look at the numbers and reduce real human beings to statistics, but each number is an equally important life– each number lived long enough to grow into a fully fledged, real living person, with their one interests, their own beliefs, their own loved ones and their own stories. Safe driving is incredibly important, not just for your own life, but for other lives as well. In order to reduce the number of deaths related to driving, there are a plethora of steps that can be taken.

Why drive unsafely when you could be driving safely? This may seem like an obvious answer, but based on the sheer heart wrenching numbers, it appears that it is not actually quite so simple. I believe that the most important step that we as a collective could take is to denormalize unsafe driving. There are too many people out there who think, “Rules are meant to be broken,” or “It’s cool to be bad by driving safely.” Competitiveness is a part of human nature, and as a result, people always try to one-up each other (“Competitiveness”). If someone brags about driving at 75 miles per hour on the freeway when the speed limit is 55 miles per hour, another person will come along and boast about their driving at 80 miles per hour. Consequently, another person will announce that they hit all the way up to even 100 miles per hour, and act coolly as if not a feat. This is problematic, and should not be celebrated. In order to denormalize unsafe driving, I feel like media representation of safe driving, along with mandatory educational presentations for people of all ages would be a good start at increasing the safety on the road.

Beyond that, there are also other reasons as to why car accidents happen, with one of the biggest causes being distracted driving, another form of unsafe driving. One of the easiest things to exponentially increase the safety level of your driving is to simply not be distracted while maneuvering your vehicle. This means not being on your phone. It’s one thing to use your phone for its useful GPS functions, but it’s another thing to be replying to texts while at a red light, or even worse, while you’re actually driving! Distracted driving caused 16% of all car accidents from 2010 to 2014, and the number of car accidents caused due to cell phones increased by a whole 38% (“Car Accident Statistics”). Think about it: you’re maneuvering a vehicle that weighs at least two tons on average, going at speeds of tens of miles per hour. Driving is heavily normalized now, especially with the US’s car culture, but no matter how normalized a piece of advanced technology becomes, it is important to stand back, pause, and just take the time to actually think about the sheer fact that you are in control of an object that weighs many thousands pounds going at high speeds that you will never amount to. That is frightening, and it is even more frightening how we as a species can simply think that it’s okay to not have our full, undivided attention on maintaining our control of that object. A tool to use to increase safety is actually the device that causes car accidents in the first place. With the release of iOS 15, iPhones can now have a specific mode of Do Not Disturb mode on: Driving Focus mode (“Use”). And even if you do not own an iPhone, other phones such as Android phones also feature a Do Not Disturb mode (“Limit”). This is a handy yet underrated tool to use to curb your bad habit of being curious about the notification that just came to your phone. If there isn’t anything buzzing loudly, trying to grab your attention, then naturally, the urge to check your phone goes down. It also makes for easier concentration on GPS navigation when there aren’t any notifications covering half of the screen. So put the phones down, and enjoy the wonderful view.

Another way to practice safe driving is to simply pay attention to what is in front of you, meaning to not have tunnel vision. Coming from personal experience, driving as a beginner can be exhilarating, but it can also be nerve-wracking, with your sweaty fingers tightly gripping the middle of the steering wheel, and your eyes directly looking straight in front of you. It’s good that you’re making sure to pay attention to the road, but if you do not have a good enough grasp of the entire situation at hand, then this can also be incredibly dangerous. As I learned how to drive, I found it hard to get myself out of my habit of tunnel vision, and I never noticed pedestrians crossing the street, or a stop sign on the side that was hidden by a particularly leafy tree. It’s important to stay alert and to take a step back to fully observe and analyze everything that is in front of you. After a few years of driving, I am now more confident in my skills, and that confidence and experience has given me the ability to feel more comfortable not looking straight into a tunnel. When I am driving, I make sure to look at the entire view in front of me, and I frequently look into my side or back mirrors, just to really grasp how many cars there are nearby me. Just having that knowledge constantly at hand does a lot for driving anxiety and for safe driving.

Safe driving is easier to achieve than one might expect, and some of the tools needed to achieve it are even already in your possession. You could be saving lives that absolutely do not need to be lost. However, that is not to say that this social change can be brought upon solely by combined individual efforts. I believe that mass media directly influences society and culture, and while there is a lot that we on our own can do, there needs to be a huge alteration to the current system that we have. For the time being, unfortunately, the prevalence of cars and car culture are not going anywhere anytime soon. Because of that, it is best to make sure you are well-equipped to survive in a world where you could lose your life at any time, or even be branded as a murderer, whether you are in the driver’s seat or whether you are the unlucky pedestrian crossing the street.

Works Cited

“Car Accident Statistics.” Driver Knowledge, https://www.driverknowledge.com/car-accident-statistics/.

“Competitiveness.” GoodTherapy.org Therapy Blog, 18 July 2019, https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/competitiveness.

“Limit Interruptions with Do Not Disturb on Android – Android Help.” Google, Google, https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en#:~:text=To%20turn%20Do%20Not%20Disturb,limit%20interruptions%20with%20Google%20Assistant.

“Road Safety Facts.” Association for Safe International Road Travel, 10 Jan. 2022, https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/.

“Use the Driving Focus on Your Iphone to Concentrate on the Road.” Apple Support, 20 Sept. 2021, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208090.