A Culture of Complacency

It’s easy to forget just how crazy cars are. There are some things that, despite being incredibly dangerous, are so unavoidable and so ubiquitous in one’s life that the body’s alert system quickly becomes desensitised to them; it must, otherwise you’ll be living your life in constant fear. Stairs are a great example—at least a million people are hospitalised in the US every year for staircase-related accidents. But regardless of how dangerous they may be, they are inevitable, and all one can do is be cautious and pray for the best. 

 

The very idea of stairs isn’t anything special, though. The idea of cars is. Hunks of metal, plastics, and glass, weighing thousands of pounds, speeding down sometimes-wide, sometimes uncomfortably narrow clearings with no barrier between them and utterly defenceless human bodies constitute a notion that sounds absurdly, irresponsibly dangerous, but that is exactly the world we live in. Being reminded of this is exactly the purpose of driver education. 

 

Ignite the engine, shift gears, hit the gas, and turn the wheel to get where you want to go; driving is rather simple—in fact, too simple, so governments have established laws to structure how we drive, restricting our mobility to lanes, stoplights, and speed limits to make roads safer. These laws cannot be enforced in real time, and there’s nothing to stop an irresponsible driver switching lanes without checking his mirror and noticing too late he’s going to crash into someone. What prevents incidents like this from happening more often than they do is that, ideally, driver education drills into students’ heads that when you want to switch lanes, you turn on your turn signal, check your mirror, and only then make a decision. 

 

In effect, driver education is the system underlying the honour code that is the road. Driver education is the singular opportunity the government has to teach its citizens the rules and prevent anarchy on the streets. Even the simplest concepts, like not switching from Drive to Reverse until your speed is 0, cannot be assumed to have been understood by everyone who sits behind the wheel, but these little lessons save lives, and I can personally attest to this. 

 

Just days ago, while reversing into a space in my school parking lot, a classmate nearly rear ended me at high speed. As the space was to my right, I had stopped on the left side of the feeder lane to create room for me as I reversed, and it just so happened that this gap was, for a fraction of a second, wide enough for a car to slip by. Now I was around halfway down the aisle, so any cars entering would have appeared very small and difficult to notice in my rearview camera. This normally isn’t an issue because other students drive relatively sensibly in the parking lot, at low speeds and watching for pedestrians. This classmate didn’t do that. Rather, he stomped on the pedal, accelerating rapidly, trying to make the gap. At the very last second, I noticed his car—which a moment ago was but a blip on my screen—suddenly just inches away from my bumper and slammed my brake. 

 

Driving school is theoretically supposed to prevent reckless driving like this, and while it cannot be held responsible for every single vehicular incident, crashes and accidents happen far too often for us not to acknowledge how many driving schools across the country are negligent in conveying to their students the seriousness of what it means to be behind the wheel. I reflect on my own experience, sitting in a Zoom meeting where most attendees had their cameras off, watching an extremely low-quality, decades-old slideshow delivered by an uninvested instructor. These lessons, similar in amateur quality, did not impart on me the real dangers of driving. Instead, it felt more like some irritating bureaucratic hassle I just had to ceremonially get through. While I have thankfully matured from that mindset, many either take far longer than me, or simply never outgrow it at all, and they tend to be the hazards on the road. 

 

Driver education schools must be revamped and rejuvenated. I’m not asking for 3D holograms of highways and instructors with PhDs in automobile construction, but we do need simple renovations: updated websites, stricter expectations on students, and instructors who care enough to enforce them. We as a society have allowed ourselves to consider driver education as nothing but a pesky bump in the road to a license, which on some level is understandable, given the effective need for a license to live in most of the United States and Canada, but this cannot continue. The expenses incurred by these reformations may also be excessive for many if not most driving schools, which is why governments need to step in; road safety is manifestly in the public interest, and justifying government spending on improving driver education shouldn’t be difficult. 

 

And on an individual level, I have a role to play, just like everyone else, in challenging the culture we have constructed where the rules of the road are taken as trivial. It’s easy to get angry when we see someone else driving dangerously, yet many of us become conspicuously silent when it’s our friends doing the dangerous driving instead, even more so when it’s ourselves. This is the opposite of how our mentality should be. There’s no use getting emotional over someone whose face you cannot and will not ever see, but those closest to you are the ones with whom your words of advice will have the greatest impact. By taking care to obey the rules and diligently advising my friends and relatives to do the same, I can do my small part to make our roads safer for all.