Driving Safe and Staying Safe

In
GoldenEye (1995), Agent Q informed 007, “Need I remind you, 007,
that you have a license to kill, not to break the traffic laws.”
Driving is a central activity to all aspects of American culture.
Want to go to the movies with your friends? Take someone on a date?
Go on a road trip? All of those activities and more require driving.
Not just any driving, though: safe driving. Drivers ed is at
the forefront of reducing car-involved fatalities, and is important
because safe driving does not only protect the driver and those the
driver is sharing the road with, but the passengers. These passengers
may be friends, family, other loved ones, and these are the people
that must be protected by the practices of safe driving.

Reducing
driving-related fatalities boils down to accessibility and
availability of resources to train and teach drivers. The challenge
becomes to provide high-quality training that is accessible to anyone
seeking said resources. I propose an institution that allows
prospective drivers to book dates and times to practice their driving
on-location with a trained driver. This way, the driver and the
professional work one-on-one and with a designated vehicle from the
institution to practice safe driving, because the only way to get
real-world experience is through action.

In
my own experience, I have never been involved in a car accident, and
hope to never be. However, I have several friends who have engaged in
car accidents ranging from fender-benders, wrecks, and irresponsible
speeding beyond the enforced limits. In order to properly tease our
friends for their irresponsible driving mistakes, my friends and I
use online tools to create free quizzes on safe driving and we all
send them to our friends who drove irresponsibly. Should we determine
their inbox is not full of safe driving quizzes, some of us post
quizzes on our social media and tag our friend who was involved in a
car-related accident or infraction. We have found that a little
lighthearted teasing goes a long way to prevent accidents, because so
far this school year no one in our friend group has crashed.

As
much as I enjoy teasing my friends for driving poorly, I make
mistakes on the road, too. In order to become a safer driver, I have
been learning more about my own vehicle: when it needs maintenance,
how it operates, when I should fill the tires with air, and almost
everything in the handbook. Maintaining your vehicle is the first
step to driving safer, which I found out the hard way a year ago when
I had to perform my first tire change. In addition, I practice safe
driving by turning off my music when I am travelling to places I have
never visited, or whenever I am using a GPS system, like Google Maps.
As Lightning McQueen put it in Cars (2006), “Float like a Cadillac,
sting like a Beemer.” McQueen always drove safe, even on the
racetrack, so everyone should follow suit.