Name: Caroline Perry
From: Grenada, Mississippi
Votes: 0
Perry
2
Driving:
More Than Holding a Wheel
As
a teenager, the one place I could not wait to be was in the driver’s
seat. Being able to drive gives a driver a sense of freedom and
independence—especially teenagers who are new to driving on their
own. However, I strongly believe that the responsibility that comes
with driving a vehicle is not stressed nearly enough to teenagers or
adults. When behind the wheel, drivers have a duty to follow driving
laws to ensure their own safety and the safety of other drivers and
car riders. So, yes, being in the driver’s seat is exciting, but
drivers need to be more aware that one careless mistake behind the
wheel can harm human lives within a split second.
With
the massive number of car crash deaths seen annually in the United
States, a major question arises: What steps can be taken to prevent
these accidents in the first place? In my opinion, the first step to
preventing car crashes begins in high school drivers ed
courses because teenagers trained how to properly drive are more
likely to be safer drivers as adults. Drivers ed courses
typically have one goal—teaching students how to drive. But, I
strongly believe, from personal experience with my driver’s
education course, that these courses are too focused on the physical
aspects of driving instead of the mental. Yes, people must know how
to properly be in command of a vehicle, but people also need to
realize how powerful distractions can be while operating a car.
Drivers need to be mentally tough to avoid giving in to these
distractions, so they can avoid having car wrecks. Therefore, I think
driver’s courses need to dig deeper into the mental aspect of
driving by focusing on this topic for at least one month of the
duration of the course.
Discussing
further into the topic of mental toughness over distractions, phones
need to be heavily addressed because a massive amount of car crashes
are due to the usage of phones while driving. Students need to be
given statistics on how many accidents are caused by phones and be
trained to not give in to phones in the driver’s seat. Sadly, I
see this terrifying behavior almost on the daily. For example, the
popular app Snapchat is a huge contributor to phone usage while
driving, and I cannot count the times that I have received a snapchat
of someone I know snapchatting and driving. For this reason, as vice
president of my school’s Interact Club, a community service club, I
would love to start a project to promote the discouragement of using
phones behind the wheel. The project would start in my school with
having speakers come talk on the topic, but hopefully, spread into
the community. Overall, car crashes cannot be completely stopped.
However, with certain steps taken to show how much responsibility
being in the driver’s seat brings, car crash numbers and fatalities
can drop instead of rise.
