How to Make the Highway not Necessarily to Hell

I think driving safety is essential for the US. I’m an international student. I come from Europe. Back there, people can drive only starting eighteen. When I got to know kids can start driving at 16 in the USA, I was astonished. If I had a child, I would be very afraid to let him drive at such a young age. Still, driving presents plenty of opportunities to children. After getting to know my American classmates I came to understand that the ability of driving on their own plays a crucial role in their lives. Now, I want to drive a car too. Still that seems like a big responsibility and quite an unnerving thing. To me, ensuring that driving is safe and giving the kids a proper drive is an indispensable component of the great opportunity of driving young people of America have.

According to FTS, drivers ages 16-17 have the highest rates of crash involvement, injuries to themselves and others and deaths of others in crashes. It is sad. It would be amazing if we could change it.

One of the major reasons for death on the roads is using social media or texting while driving. The death on the road because of using social media occurs in young people mostly because they’re the most vigorous social media users.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nine people in the US die every day because of social media on the road.

I came up with a few ways to reduce incidents on the road occuring because of smartphone usage.

The best tool to reduce the usage of social media is social media itself.

The most brilliant example is the #deletefacebook campaign that took off in 2020. The campaign motivated meta users to delete their accounts so Mark Zuckerberg won’t steal their data. Now, guess where the #deletefacebook and #boycottzuckerberg hashtags were posted tens of thousands times. On Facebook, of course. Set aside Instagram (same company with Facebook) with 161 thousands of posts with the #deletefacebook hashtag.

Social media is perfect when it comes to raising awareness as well. Greta Thunberg’s Climate School Strike started with a little post on Twitter back in August 2018. The phrase “Me too” was tweeted by Alyssa Milano on October 15, 2017, and had been used more than 200,000 times by the end of the day. It was also tweeted more than 500,000 times by October 16 and the hashtag was used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours on Facebook.

The other thing is that targeted group we want to reach out to are teenagers. Teenagers are one of the first things that come to mind when we speak about the influence of social media. About ninety percent of American young people aged 13 — 25 use social media. On the one hand, that is what creates the problem we want to solve. On the other hand, that gives us a great opportunity to solve it.

Where do we start? We could launch a campaign. That coud be one that encourages social media users to start their every post with a phrase that would make young people think twice before continuing surfing the web if they’re on the road. It would be best if it was not a long phrase, but something short to make a hashtag that would be easy to type and rememer, something like: “#stopreadingifdriving”, “#donotreadwhileontheroad”, “#stopthenread” or “#notforroad”.

We could also make an app that would understand when a phone or a tablet’s user is driving so when that happens the app would block social media apps from working. There are similar apps that are designed to make users cut either their own or their children’s screen time. When the time limit set per day for a cartain app is reached, the system doesn’t let you access the app. The app could track if the device’s owner’s moving or not using the same technology as apps for navigation use.

That app would be targeted at parents of the teenagers mostly, based on the fact the most of the similar apps for screen time control are apps like Kidslox, FamiSafe, Qustodio Parental Control that allow parents set time limits for their young mobile devices users. Teenagers are more independent than young kids that get their screen time controlled, still the app could become popular. Watching too many tiktoks can less likely result in a death of a seven year old kid than in a demise of a seventeen-year-old who’s watching the same tiktoks on the road. That app could possibly become a life-saver so it should definitely attract parents and even children themselves.

Hope you liked my ideas))

Thanks for reading!

Hope someday we reach our goal of making the roads more safe)