In the United States, driving on public roads drifts between a right and a privilege. The risks associated with the entire population operating motor vehicles cannot be understated. On the other hand, nearly all of our cities are built not only to cater to private road transit, but even require it. Public transportation is spotty at best in much of urban and suburban America, and flat out non-existent in any rural part of our country. Both working and schooling from home are booming concepts, but are far from universal. Effectively, the entire US population from ages 16 on up to 70, has to be able to drive in order for the country to function. Not only does everyone need to drive, but this requirement often starts before adulthood. 16 year olds regularly need to get to part time jobs and school on their own, often with a lack of societal grace concerning how they get there. This expectation never waivers, adults cannot be unable to drive.
is ubiquitous; it’s also extraordinarily high stakes. Weighing property damage, medical bills, and lives lost due to driving provides us with astronomical, terrifying numbers. Safety regulations and engineering improve year after year, but there’s no getting around the reality of strapping someone into a metal rocket, and sending them down the road at a literal mile a minute, often mere feet from other metal rockets. Road conditions and driving culture will vary wildly from state to state, adding even more variables leading to accidents. From this bleak point, we have to consider additional massive risks including distracted driving, under educated driving, road rage, and driving while impaired. Private transportation costs us as a society an undue amount of financial and physical tragedy, while simultaneously being an absolute requirement for the country we’ve built. Making driving both as safe and accessible as possible should be paramount.
Given the great gravity of driving as a whole, we need to take a look at how we prepare drivers to get behind the wheel, new and existing. Everyone has been to some amount of driving school, and there’s a couple of unsettling sentiments around this schooling. The first, is that most adult drivers remember very little of what was taught, and earned most of their applicable experience on the road itself without safety nets. The second can be seen when introducing an adult driver to driving school lessons later in their driving career; concepts taught change over time, leaving different generations of drivers with different information at their disposal. The way we approach motor vehicle education should be comprehensive, consistent, and continuous.
Many other road heavy countries will require advanced road tests to be completed, subjecting prospective drivers to hazardous conditions and requiring demonstrations of defensive driving. Most would-be American drivers will be told to drive around the block once, and leave with a license. Driver’s education must seek to teach drivers advanced driving concepts, with rigorous driver testing and standards sitting in front of license issuance. It needs to be comprehensive.
America is vast place, with each state having as much variation as many different countries. However, anyone with a valid driver’s license is free to operate vehicles on any public road, in any state. We need to have a centralized training rubric for driver’s education, which can cover the majority of road conditions and local laws across the country. This would require a significantly larger, longer training course, but the only reliable alternative is drivers licenses which are only valid in specific states. This more consistent approach would both enforce training accountability in all corners of the country, and prepare drivers for the long list of differing state laws around the usage of public roads.
With a more rigorous, more constant baseline for the education of new drivers, everyone first coming onto the road should be more competent, and more conscientious of the risks and realities of driving. Drivers would be less reliant on cold, hard earned experience, surely chock-full with misconceptions and misplaced intentions, and instead would be well rounded and educated. The final step of a rejuvenated management of driver’s education, is keeping drivers informed and sharp as years go by. License renewal needs to be coupled with refresher driver training and testing, keeping the entire driving population to this pre-established baseline. It’s incredibly important that we don’t just engineer better driver’s education, but also keep said education universally accessible and mandated.
I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t either been in accident themselves, or know someone who’s been in a serious accident. I’ve been in two myself, for both of which I was deemed “not at fault.” A stronger driver’s education would agree that with properly taught defensive driving, very, very few accidents involve anyone who is completely not at fault. Driving is far too dangerous, and far too much of a requirement for us to not all be accountable for safe roads. As I’ve gotten older and improved on the road, defensive driving has likely saved my life. I shouldn’t have had to learn how to drive well on my own, however. I should have first pulled out onto a public road already knowing much of what I know now. If this were the perspective we all had on preparing new drivers for the road, countless deaths could be prevented on a daily basis.