Before It Becomes an Emergency

I wasn’t even in the car when it was hit.

I had parked in Philadelphia and returned to find that someone had bashed into it while I was away. I remember standing there, looking at the damage, frustrated and confused. The car had been parked. I wasn’t speeding. I wasn’t distracted. I wasn’t even behind the wheel. Yet a decision someone else had made on the road had somehow found its way into my life.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt. Compared with the accidents that change families forever, mine was small. But it left me thinking about something I had rarely considered before: on the road, safety is never entirely individual.

I have driven in Nashville and Philadelphia, and I have spent plenty of time on public transportation. Each has made me experience the road differently. I have been the driver checking my mirrors before changing lanes, the passenger trusting someone else with my safety, and the pedestrian waiting at a crosswalk hoping the approaching driver sees me.

The more time I have spent on roads, the more I have realized how much trust exists there between complete strangers. I trust that you will stop at the red light. You trust that I will check my blind spot. The pedestrian trusts that both of us are paying attention. Most of us will never speak to one another. Still, for a few seconds, our lives can depend on the decisions we make.

That is why I think driver education matters so much. Learning to drive cannot simply mean learning how to control a car well enough to pass a test. It has to teach us how to recognize danger before we are forced to react to it.

Strangely, I came to understand that lesson even better through healthcare. As a graduate student studying Applied Analytics, I recently built a machine-learning system using more than 40,000 ICU patient records to identify sepsis risk before clinical onset. The model achieved 89% recall, but that wasn’t the number I kept thinking about afterward.

It was four to six hours.

That was how early the system was designed to recognize risk. Four to six hours could mean time for a clinician to notice that something is changing. Time to investigate. Time to make a decision before deterioration becomes a crisis. Driving, I realized, works much the same way. A crash may happen in seconds, but the decisions leading to it often begin earlier. Someone leaves home exhausted. Someone is running late and presses harder on the accelerator. A notification appears and the driver thinks, I’ll only look for a second. Someone follows too closely because they have done it a hundred times before and nothing happened. Until something does.

That may be one of the most dangerous things about unsafe driving: sometimes we get away with it.

Nothing happens when we check the phone, so checking it again feels easier. We speed and arrive safely, so those extra miles per hour begin to feel harmless. Eventually, luck starts looking like proof that what we are doing is safe. It isn’t.

Good driver education should interrupt that thinking. It should teach defensive driving, following distance, distraction prevention, fatigue awareness, and how to recognize hazards before they become emergencies. I also believe learning should continue after someone receives a license. Experience can make us better drivers, but it can also make us comfortable enough to forget how much responsibility comes with being behind the wheel.

Technology can help. Automatic emergency braking, blind-spot warnings, safer intersections, and better-designed crosswalks can create another opportunity to prevent a mistake.

But technology cannot make the most important decision for us. A car can tell me that someone is in my blind spot. It cannot make me care whether that person gets home safely. That part belongs to me.

So the biggest thing I can do to become a safer driver is surprisingly simple: give myself more time.

More distance between my car and the one ahead. More time to leave so that being late does not become an excuse to speed. A few extra seconds to check my surroundings before moving. And when I am tired, distracted, or otherwise unable to give the road my full attention, the maturity to recognize that getting somewhere can wait.

I can also speak up when I am not the driver. If someone driving me reaches for a phone or takes an unnecessary risk, staying quiet does not make me uninvolved. I would rather create an awkward moment in a car than spend years wishing I had said something.

Public transportation has made me understand that responsibility even more. Sitting on a bus, I sometimes think about how many people have quietly placed their safety in one person’s hands. Walking through a city reminds me that road safety also belongs to the person who never entered a car.

Behind every traffic-fatality statistic is someone who expected to arrive somewhere.

Someone was expected at work. At dinner. At school. At home. That is what I want to remember whenever I am behind the wheel.

My work in healthcare taught me that sometimes the most valuable thing prevention gives us is not an answer. It is time. Time to notice. Time to think. Time to choose differently.

Most safe decisions will never become stories. Nobody will know about the accident that never happened because someone put their phone away, slowed down, left more space, or waited another second.

And maybe that is the point.