Our generation continues to make fun of the seventy-year-old grandma behind the wheel who goes ten below the speed limit and can barely see over the wheel, or the forty-year-old mom who is turning around and yelling at her kids to be quiet all while doing her makeup, eating a sandwich, and driving; but what about us? Us teens are no better than the generations prior to us when it comes to safe driving, and I don’t necessarily believe we did this to ourselves. Growing up in this era, we are accustomed to watching Netflix, scrolling on TikTok, and driving all at once as the “norm” (Yes, I have seriously seen this countless times amongst my age group). Teen driver safety is such an important public issue because we need to teach the next teens in the world how to rewire their brains to only focus on the roads. Without this, we are endangering not only ourselves but everyone else around us on the roads. Driver’s Education taught us to remain focused on the road and only the road. Driver’s Ed shows us videos of distracted drivers to show us how much you could regret watching just one TikTok while driving, yet in reality, this slips away overtime.
As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, distractions are one of the biggest challenges we face today on the road, we all know this. So, if we know that distractions on the road can lead to countless injuries and deaths, why can’t we stop? My answer to this is that we grew up in the “iPad kid” generation. If you don’t know what this means, let me quickly explain it. Generations ago, you may have seen kids playing outside or throwing a ball with their friends, yet you rarely see this anymore, this is because of the iPad kid generation. Almost every young child I see is carrying a tablet around with them because their parents know it is the only way to finally shut them up for just a few minutes. We have grown up being constantly stimulated by multiple different materials at the same time by the games, YouTube, or messaging we were constantly entranced by as iPad kids. My answer to overcome this, although it may seem simple: play music, put your directions on, and drive. This way we are allowing all our “iPad kid” senses to be stimulated that normally would be while being on our phones, while still being an alert driver. Although it may seem sad that we need to do such a thing, I believe this is the quickest and safest way for our generation to adapt to no (or minimal) phones on the road.
One personal observation I have with this topic is my uncle who was in a motorcycle accident. A young, distracted college girl turned in front of my uncle and cut him off while he was on his motorcycle. The poor choices of an unalert driver on the road caused my uncle to get t-boned off his motorcycle, leading to a near death accident. He came out of the accident with a hematoma larger than the size of a baseball on his head due to the force and impact of his head hitting a manhole cover on the road in the accident. This is just one of thousands and thousands of stories like his.
Promoting safer driving is not a one step process. To promote and prevent more accidents like this from happening, we need to meet our generation in the middle. Our generation is so addicted to our phones that just telling them to, “put the phone down” or showing them scary accident videos from distracted drivers doesn’t work anymore. That’s how addicted we are. So, to our generation, yes you can play your music, yes you can follow the maps on your Apple CarPlay, but no you cannot watch TikTok and get a quick dopamine hit while driving. And to our community, we need to account for this phone usage of other drivers on the roads. Although sad, we need to be extra cautious of questionable behavior on the roads and assume everyone else around you is on their phones to protect ourselves. Although rewiring our brains is the main goal, I don’t believe that is achievable for our generation anymore. I believe we will have to settle for phone-included accident prevention methods for now and keep the iPads away from our kids for the next generation. So maybe we really do need to stop and think about nagging on grandma for being such a bad driver when our driving may be just as bad as hers.