Drivers ed: The Key to Decreased Teen Driver Deaths

When
I first pushed on the gas pedal of my mother’s
battered 2007 Prius in June of 2017, I remember feeling an
overwhelming sense of panic and anxiety. This feeling of
all-encompassing nervousness was majorly having to do with the fact
that, when I was very young, I was in a horrible car accident.
Luckily, no one died or was injured permanently, but many of my
family members were in the car with me. I had grown up with them
telling me about it in vivid detail, and therefore I’ve
always been a vigilant presence behind the wheel.

Even
with my extreme attentiveness on the road, there were definitely some
things that I had no knowledge about when I first started driving.
This is why drivers ed is so important, especially for new teen
drivers like myself. Drivers ed provides an opportunity for new
drivers to easily learn about the basic rules of the road, techniques
for driving safe, and the major consequences of being a distracted
driver.
Because being a teenage driver is so statistically dangerous, driver
education has always been important to me because it’s
essentially providing a guide for how to not die in a car. By using
the tips that I’ve
learned from drivers ed, I am able to improve as a driver in
terms of attentiveness, control, and general safety.

The
best part about drivers ed, however, is that the information it
provides has the potential to save millions of lives. In a study by
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2015, it was found that teens
taking drivers ed classes were significantly less likely to be
involved in car crashes, which has great implications for reducing
the teen driver death rate. This is incredibly important due to the
fact that teens are the most likely to die in a car crash out of any
other age group. If all teens were a part of drivers ed, it’s
nearly statistically certain that there would be less teenage driver
deaths annually.

I
think, with those statistics, it’s
in the general public’s
best interest for all teens to all get some form of drivers ed.
I don’t
necessarily think this has to be through guided courses or even an
official teacher, as some people like myself didn’t
have the resources to do this while learning to drive. However, I
believe it is absolutely essential for all drivers, new and
experienced, to receive some drivers ed in the form of manuals,
apps, online seminars, or just a report of facts. These resources
already exist in these forms, but I think there’s
definitely an avenue for improvement in terms of advertising and
publicizing that this information is easily accessible and publicly
available. By increasing the initiative to advocate for driver
education, thousands of lives could be saved, and so many people’s
driving habits could be improved—including
my own.