Dangers of Driving

A peaceful mood takes over my mind. I’m relaxed and drifted off to the world of dreams. I’m a sleepy five year old in the car one morning on the way to church without a worry in the world. I can feel the car stop at a red light, suddenly the car coming in from behind hits us. I awake, scared and turn around and the first thing my eyes see is the phone in his hand. My experience with the car accident could not compare to fatal car accidents teenagers are involved in that happen all around us everyday. Our world has innovated throughout time because of technology. It is able to succeed in many different areas and makes life easy for us people but it also creates a major distraction for us and younger generations. Our world has also made an attempt to improve cars so that there are minimal distractions with phones. For example, some cars will give you warnings to not use your phone while driving. Is it effective, possibly not. Other cars have built in screens ,but this is still a distraction. I am seventeen years old and have experienced driving first hand. When I sit at stop lights I see the amount of people that are on their phones, some attempt to drive with one hand and their phone on the other. I think that many can agree phones are one of our big problems in driving along with speeding and irresponsible driving. Teenagers feel the need to answer friends’ texts quickly or update their life status or just simply scroll through social media because they are bored. Of course there are necessities that come with it like a GPS or maybe even playing music while driving but one look down at the phone can change your life in the car. I had a friend that was rushing to get to school from work for an important event. She hit traffic on her way. Desperate to get to school, she finds her phone to look up on the GPS the fast route to school. While she’s typing the name of the school her phone drops. Her car is going at a steady speed with the traffic. She looked down attempting to reach her phone, what she did not know was that the car in front of her had stopped. Suddenly, her truck takes a hit to the back of the other truck creating a dent to the front of her truck from the hitch ball. She was scared, not knowing what she was going to do. Luckily, the man that she had hit was compassionate to her and let her know to use that experience as a lesson for the future. With her experience she did not have the wrong intentions, however her carelessness could have been avoided by focusing her attention on the road and the traffic she had ahead of her. Another main problem with the younger generations driving would be speeding. Many teenagers find speeding cool or they are just too impatient and want to get ahead. Personally, I feel that it’s a popular topic I have heard spoken a lot at school, especially the younger kids to the older ones in high school. They ask “how fast do you go? I got 65 in a 45.” In an attempt to sound appealing to others, the only thing my mind travels to is that I would never want to be in a car with them. While driving too I can tell which are teenagers when they cling to the back of your car waiting for you to go faster when the speed limit is 55 they want to go 70 so they just pass me. Around our county and the county next to us I see a lot of cameras being installed to help catch people speeding. I like the initiative being taken because people can suffer the consequences of speeding through their bank account. It’s not a full solution for irresponsible teenagers or grown adults from speeding but it’ll help them see that actions have consequences. If they really want to speed they can pay for it later. Overall, driving is a privilege that allows us to get from one place to another and enjoy time either to ourselves or with friends. We should strive for safety for ourselves and for others around us, we do not know what could happen in the next minute of our lives so we should use it with care.