How driving instruction saved my life

If you were to tell
someone from 200 years ago that he was going to get on a 3500-pound
steel death machine and go at surreal speeds faster than any land
animal with hundreds of other operators of the same machine feet
apart from one another he would be befuddled.

In the current
century, we have numbed our intuition because everybody does it and
it’s normal, however the danger is still out there and as a
survivor of a car accident it is not something even remotely alright
to go through.

I was driving at
night and out of the bushes jumped a deer out in front of my Mini
Cooper, if I had not received proper teaching I don’t know what
would’ve happened to me that night however I was able to calmly
stop my car.

My car was totaled
but I came out alright physically, that memory and fright still
remains with me today.

Since the accident,
I started advocating for drivers’ education. I grew up in Israel
where driving school is mandatory and the seriousness people view
driving as is totally different than American drivers. I believe as
if paying for driving school under an instructor instead of your
parent lets the driver not only learn valuable skills (like I applied
during my accident) but also the instructor teaches the student the
implications of risky driving which not every parent does. A driving
instructor also teaches the student in a more suitable environment,
instead of using a regular car, some instructor’s cars utilize duel
control vehicles that can be controlled from both the driver
(student) positions and the passenger (instructor) position. This is
critical because the most dangerous time for the sake of the
passengers of the student car and everyone on the road is when
someone is learning driving thus the duel control system can save
countless lives.

The instructor also
makes sure the student is not on his phone during the lesson.

Everybody advocates
for no texting while driving (don’t get me wrong it is horrible and
must be stopped) but research points to the fact that the human brain
cannot completely concentrate on two things at once, one activity
always goes on behalf of the other activity.

For this reason, I
believe that more lives could be saved if people don’t talk on
their phones during driving at all and am grateful that driving
instructors make sure that at least during a driver’s learning
period they are not on their phones at all and make sure that they
know the reasoning behind it.

One more thing
driving instructors make sure to happen which is critical is two
hands on the wheel. When people mimic their parent’s driving style
they usually learn to drive with one hand on the steering wheel which
is very dangerous. If I had one hand on the wheel while the accident
occurred I could have had less control of the car thus leading to a
far more dangerous accident.