Forty-six years my mother has been alive. It was on her forty-sixth birthday that I could’ve lost her, could’ve lost myself too due to the recklessness of an individual who was distracted by something that wasn’t more important than a life.
We hadn’t gone anywhere special for my mom’s birthday, just to my grandparent’s house to celebrate like the rest of our birthdays, nothing out of the ordinary. We only lived 20 minutes away from them so we would visit every weekend to help with meal preparation for the week or just to have dinner and spend time together. We left their house around eleven-o-clock at night, around the usual time during the summer months when my sister and I don’t have school. We were at the entrance of my grandparent’s neighborhood waiting for the light to turn green. If we had been any more impatient maybe it would’ve turned green sooner. The light under the over ramp directly across us turned green and a little buggy made its way across until a truck 3 times the size of the buggy flew through the intersection tearing off the bumper of the buggy and the front left wheel of the truck, redirecting the truck towards our car but barely missing causing it to end up in a road sign 10 feet from us. If our light would have been the one to turn green, I wouldn’t be writing this.
As we mature, acquire careers, and families, driving becomes a part of our daily routine like brushing your teeth in the morning. Overtime it becomes mindless as we believe we have mastered the art and skill of driving to zone out, leading to a decrease in our cognizance as we drive, ultimately becoming liability on the road. Taking drivers education is a pivotal experience as we experience the possible dangers of driving from the safety of an enclosed environment. Gaining the knowledge about various road rules, meaning of signs, significance of basic signaling and checking the blind spot as we shift lanes. Think about the last time you were someone’s passenger, did you notice if the driver checked their blind spot every time they shift lanes, it is one of the first rules anyone learns when driving, always check the blind spot, but overtime some people feel they don’t need to as if they are sure no one is there, but not thinking that someone could be there. Everything that is taught in drivers education ensures that the lives of others are taken into consideration by being aware of our individual actions.
Lives are lost every day by the recklessness of intoxicated or impaired drivers. When I was in the 8th grade, I found a solution to battle this growing issue. I volunteered at a Microsoft event one day that was being hosted at our local mall, with no intention of what was to be done. Teams were made and we were given the task of coming up with a solution to a global issue with the use of Artificial Intelligence. My team won the entire competition in the Houston area against a minimum of twenty-five other teams with our creation. We called her E.V.A. she is designed to learn an individual’s daily behaviors while driving including health ultimately being able to recognize any abnormalities in the individual’s driving patterns. Abnormalities in the pattern can include intoxicated behaviors, sleeping, and health emergencies, after detecting an abnormality E.V.A would contact local authorities of the symptoms and send a distress signal to other drivers that also have the A.I installed in their car and take measures to send signals to drivers without E.V.A. This program has become my lifetime goal as it can save thousands of lives, my career path in engineering will enable me to pursue further research and designs to make this an actual product that can be used as part of the daily routine to clean the spots in our teeth we missed.
Driving alone may seem like a solo task, when in reality it is a social experiment, you must be able to predict what someone is going to do, how will it affect you, and ultimately how will you respond. My mother always tells me to drive defensively and slow down when I am in a skeptical situation to avoid any unforeseen futures. There are a number of steps an individual can take to promote being a safer and more confident driver on the road including eliminating distractions such as cell phone usage, as well as maintaining proper vehicle care to avoid mechanical failures. Within the past year, a video spread through social media about a truck on the Ronald Reagan Freeway in Los Angeles, California, driving at normal speeds, when all the sudden their tire unattached itself from the truck rolling into the left lane next to it and causing a small SUV to run over it and flipping through the air. The truck continued to move forward but crossing three or four lanes in the process. This scene, similar to ones only viewed in movies as they are fake, but this incident was in fact real, and unfortunately this could happen to anyone, on any day. Vehicle care may not be directly taught in a driver’s education course, but it should be part of every individuals knowledge to provide safety for yourself and others.
We have all had moments of fear when we have reason to believe one of our loved ones has gotten into an accident, even if they didn’t, every time they walk out the front door, they are putting their life at risk. As someone who doesn’t want to worry whether my mom will come back from a ten-minute drive to the grocery store, I strive to make the world a safer place in the most common tasks we perform.