Learning to become a driver in California at the age of 17 required me to get 6 hours of behind the wheel training with an instructor. At the time of writing this I have already gone through all the ropes of learning to drive, so all my reasons for why drivers ed is a necessity come from personal experience.
I never had any interest in learning to drive before my junior year because of my state being notorious for having terrible drivers. I felt scared to get on the road up until the summer of 2023 when my parents pushed me to get my permit. My dad is a very experienced driver and was able to build up my courage and made me feel comfortable on the road. Having someone like him is something I think nervous learners should try to find as it will help you greatly. After a couple weeks of driving with my parents, my scheduled lessons with an instructor were right around the corner. Although my parents were able to guide me pretty well there were still moments on the road where I panicked and made dangerous mistakes. My lessons almost completely removed those moments from my driving. Over the course of 2 weeks I learned all the rules of where to stop or slow down, and even got comfortable enough to go on the freeway. I think it’s a shame that all states don’t require you to get these lessons, I think they would help struggling drivers so much and make the roads a much safer place.
Even though I believe requiring lessons for minors in all states would benefit us all greatly, there is a larger root cause that has to do with teens after they pass their driving tests. All my evidence comes from personal experience or observation so please take it with a grain of salt. When I began driving on my own, in the beginning I was extremely cautious with all of my decisions and respected the law. Now I hate to admit it but after a couple of months I started to let my guard down and paid less attention. All until I almost rear ended someone while I got distracted by my own thoughts. I have made very strict rules with myself about phones while I’m driving. I never feel the need to use it while driving since I know the potential consequences. But even without the phone I still got distracted enough to almost crash. This is where problems start to arise with less disciplined drivers than I. By asking questions around my school campus, with other students I knew drove, I found out they had a similar pattern to me on how they drove. They would start out very cautious but eventually got comfortable enough to look at their phones at every possible chance. It’s at this point where I started seeing a pattern within a lot of the teens. They would start to get comfortable with driving and then get into a position where they can be a danger on the road. The major root of this problem is the phones for driving teens. But you may be thinking “aren’t phones also a problem with adults too? And you would be correct, mostly. Most adults were born in a time without phones and have the self control to put them down. I feel teens nowadays will continue to use their phones on the road even if they have a couple scary close calls.
Now for my solution it’s a tricky one to apply and requires more than the will of the teens alone. My advice will only help rid of the phone distraction but as my personal experience showed, new drivers will get distracted by more than just their phones. Teens are the rebellious type and parents telling them to simply not use their phones will never work. I may be stepping a bit out of line here but I think my thought up solution is as least invasive as possible. Most phones nowadays have a feature in their settings where it shows screen time. At least on IPhones, it also shows a record of how many times the phone was “picked up” or turned on. Parents should check the time before their child goes to drive and once more afterwards. Now a parent will be able to see if their child really paid attention to them and know if to punish them or not. I think this will actually be effective because the only way to disable this tracker is to turn off screen time entirely and then the parent will know for sure something is up.
Well I truly believe that the solution I came up with here could potentially save many teen’s lives. The parents just need to know when to put their foot down. My essay may have gone a bit off topic on the whole drivers education portion, but It felt wrong for me to ignore what I knew would truly help our teen drivers.