Educating Drivers

Driving is one of the quintessential moments of a teenager’s life. As they are giddy to just hop into the car and drive, there’s so much excitement going on in their head. They aren’t thinking of the consequences of an accident. New drivers are inexperienced, giving them a higher likelihood of being in a collision. A study done by the National Household Travel Survey found that the crash rate per mile driven is about 1.5 times as high for 16-year-old drivers as it is for 18–19-year-old drivers. This is exactly why driver ed is so important and needs to be taken seriously. As more and more young drivers merge onto the roadways, driver’s ed can help reduce the number of driving-related deaths and help drives stay safe on the roads.

Drivers’ ed is extremely important to help reduce the chances of a collision. Drivers ed teaches many essential skills of driving such as driver judgment, common sense, and defensive driving, all in hopes to keep everyone safe on the road. If driver’s ed didn’t exist, the roads would be a complete nightmare. Studies done by the University of Nebraska have shown that young drivers who have not completed driver’s education are 75 percent more likely to get a traffic ticket. A traffic ticket is one of the last things you want to receive as a younger driver because you can’t go to traffic school to get it removed from your record. The same study also found that 24 percent are more likely to be involved in a fatal or injury accident and 16 percent more likely to have an accident. Every day lives are saved because of the thing that the individual learned in drivers ed.

Many steps can be taken to reduce the number of driving-related deaths. I believe the most important one is to make driver ed mandatory to get your license. In the United States, 32 out of the 50 states are required teens to take driver’s ed before they can take the exam before they get their license. If you compare the percentage of collisions for people who took driver’s ed versus the people who didn’t take driver’s ed, there is about a two percent difference. The people who didn’t take driver’s ed had a higher percentage of collisions. If you take two percent of the United States population, you will get 6,660,000 collisions. If 0.7 percent of collisions are fatal, then about 50,000 people’s lives could have been saved if they took driver’s ed before they got their license.

I also believe that driver’s ed should emphasize driving ego. Thinking back to my drivers’ ed class, they didn’t touch on that subject too much. They mainly focus on the basic rules of the road, as driver judgment, common sense, and defensive driving. A lot of young drivers think they are invincible, but the reality is accidents happen in just a split second so you never really know when one could happen. Particularly for young teenage boys, they get cocky and want to street race or drift their car, which can be a recipe for disaster, especially for an inexperienced driver. Not only are you putting your life at risk, but you’re also putting others’ lives at risk. Unfortunately, something similar happened to me, which ended up causing me to get into a car accident.

I was 16 years old at the time and only had my license for about six months. My friends and I were at the local parking lot where everyone typically did donuts at. My friend handed me the keys to his brand-new Mercedes because he wanted me to teach him how to do proper donuts. It was going well until I got extremely cocky. I decided to leave the parking lot and head down a little side street. The side street has a 90-degree bend, so I thought it was a good idea to try to drift around the corner in a car that was not made to slide whatsoever. I ended up sliding the corner ok, but when I counter-steered to catch the drift, I shot my friend and I into the curb, barely missing the pole at 20 miles per hour. Luckily no one was hurt, but the car was in bad shape. If it wasn’t for the young stupidity of my friend and I, this incident could have been easily preventable. I did learn my lesson, and it has taught me how quickly something can go wrong while driving. It has also taught me the importance of being careful on the road, as well as not letting your ego get to your head while driving.

Now that I have been driving for a while now, I feel confident in my skills, but that’s not to say that I don’t have room to improve. I tend to have quiet, the lead foot, which can easily get you in a lot of trouble when you drive a 450-horsepower car. It’s something I always must be careful of and consider the consequences before I put my foot to the floor. When it comes down to helping others be safer drivers, my biggest piece of advice is to always be 100 percent aware. What I mean by this is to know your surroundings, know where the cars are around you, and always be scanning as you drive. Driving is a privilege, not a right, so don’t lose that privilege for yourself or others when you’re on the road.

Works Cited

https://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/2015/08/13/Study:+Driver%27s+ed+significantly+reduces+teen+crashes,+tickets#:~:text=Young%20drivers%20who%20have%20not,an%20accident%2C%20the%20study%20showed.

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendrivers_factsheet.html