Proposals for how to make our roads safer

From my experience, a major cause of teen death is drunk driving. One of the main reasons teens drive while drunk is either they think they aren’t drunk, need a ride home from a party/bar and don’t want to admit they were drinking to their parents, or don’t care. While I believe the first issue can be solved by making breathalyzers much cheaper and more readily accessible, and the third issue is really a person by person case, the second issue is the one I think is most solvable. A lot of teens are afraid of admitting wrongdoing to adults/authority figures even when it may be a safer option because they are scared of punishment. For example, when teenagers do drugs together and one overdoses, many teens are apprehensive about calling for help for fear of getting in trouble for doing drugs. This fear increases the number of overdose victims, and I suspect a similar fear increases the amount of teen drunk drivers. If you tell your parents you’re going to your friends house but actually go to a party, at the end you might be more dismissive of your own drunkenness to avoid calling your parents and admitting the lie. Going back to the drug example, the way state lawmakers get around this issue is by passing “Good Samaritan laws” which exempts someone from punishment if they are calling emergency services for things like an overdose. While I don’t think this is exactly applicable to teen drunk driving, I think the principles do translate. Obviously the best case scenario would be no teen drinking whatsoever, but barring that, a way for teens to feel safe in getting help is the next best option. I propose an app, either government or privately funded, which does just that. The app would be similar to Uber except hyper focused on one issue: Making these teens feel comfortable in getting help instead of risking it by driving themselves. The app would have professionals trained in teen/adolescent care be drivers that are assigned to any request for a ride. The driver than picks up the teen and takes them to their house, no questions asked. I think the system could be abused by having people feign drunkenness in order to hitch a ride, but if even one teen decides not to drive because of this app, that means it was a success. The main thing to tackle is privacy. Obviously a business like this could seem shady, which is why the vetting process has to be extreme, but it also must make the kids feel safe by not disclosing to parents unless under extreme circumstances. I think anonymity is key to gaining trust. When teens chose to drink and drive, they are basically doing a cost benefit analysis in their head between the cost of risking your life versus the benefit of not getting caught. This app could take away the cost while retaining the benefit. I think again like Uber this app should grow out of a few cities first and then expand overtime. To hail a ride, all you have to do is send a pin to your location and the closest driver will come get you. This might seemingly allow people not in our target group to take advantage of the anonymous driving, but this is where our professionals come in. If it’s clear that the person in the car is not drunk or under the influence then the evaluator will be able to pick up on these signs and drop them off and give a warning to the app to remove this person who is abusing the app. If the professional does not detect these signs, they can use their counseling skills to try to talk to the teen personally and learn why they are here drinking in the first place. Due to the circumstances, this is likely not going to dissuade any of them from drinking in the future but any help is worth it. I genuinely see this as a potentially life saving idea. Like stated earlier, it will essentially just be a more discrete Uber with more care being given by trained professionals. This of course would never stop teenage drunk driving and there will still be teens who are weary of the service, by providing this we can give teens a safe, trusting environment to enter into, where they can realize the risk is just not worth it.

This proposal however only attacks a certain section of driving fatalities. I, as a newly minted driver, have seen driving education first hand and, at least in my state, it’s pretty bad. I live in Georgia and here we take what is called the Joshua’s Law online test, which you must pass as one of the checkoffs in order to get your license. The entire module is about 20 hours, but you can start and stop it every time. A major problem is at each section even if you digested the information you have to wait for the 1 hour timer to finish in order to be able to take the test and proceed. They also have a system every 2 minutes where you have to click a button in order to show you don’t have the screen tabbed out. Instead what this system causes, from my experience, is MORE PEOPLE to tune out the information by just skipping to the end of every section and then every two minutes coming back to the screen to tap on the button. Instead of being informative, this module system causes students to become easily bored. I suspect similar modules are being rolled out or have been rolled out in multiple states. While the intention is good, it feels like the effort is essentially worthless. For me, a few changes I would make is: 1: Make it a lockdown browser in order to ensure students don’t tab out. 2: Allow students to go at their own speed. Forcing kids to spend longer than they need on their problem incentivises kids to not try as hard. 3: Instead of using a button to make sure kids are paying attention, USE THE TESTS FOR THAT. The entire purpose of tests at the end of modules is to test how much you were paying attention. Make the tests less forgiving too. On mine, after an attempt they let you retake the test as many times as you want and tell you which questions you got wrong. This just allows people who didn’t read the module at all to skip to the test after the hour passed, guess on the answers, and then just change them until you get the right answer, which obviously does nothing to further driver education. Obviously, each state deals with Driver Ed differently but I use Georgia as an example because I think the problem of a separation between the students and the material being taught is nationwide. Make education more involved/entertaining but also make the tests more important and integral. The only way to further Driver Ed is to force people to actually learn, which is obviously a difficult, yet exceedingly important venture