There is a lot more to teen driver safety than it is a personal concern, it is in fact a very important public concern, which has to do with families, schools and whole communities. In the United States, motor vehicle crashes continue to cause the greatest number of teenage deaths that result in thousands of deaths and millions of injuries annually. T behind these numbers are humans and families that have their lives altered eternally with one action, one look at a cellphone, or one instance of naivete. The existence of this fact cannot be overlooked by society. The protection of teen drivers is important as it saves lives, avoids the experience of a trauma and defines a responsible habit, which is lifetime. The key to this endeavor is a paramount tool- driver education.
Driver education cannot simply involve learning motor vehicle traffic signs or written examinations, but it should be a formal educational framework into responsibility. It not only teaches teens how to operate a vehicle, but also how to ethically use the road, how to cope with distractions and how to make split-second judgment under pressure. The teens learn through either being taught by a peer or their parents who are clearly doing wrong habits unintentionally. A gap can be filled by the professional types of driver education, which focus on the avoidance of risks and defensive driving and effects of impaired and distracted driving in real life. Driver education is in many senses a shield against man-made tragedies, and since they are preventable they should be avoided at all costs even before they emerge.
Nevertheless, even education, underage drivers have serious problems on the road. The most dangerous and common is distractions. It takes only a few seconds to distract the driver by texting, switching the music, using navigation systems or only looking at the notifications, which will be enough to have a deadly accident. It is also a contributory factor of peer pressure. Several adolescents want to impress their friends, which results in speeding, dangerous stunts, or ignoring the traffic laws. Lastly, is the experience factor which is sorely lacking. It is all about making choices on the road and new drivers are yet to develop some instincts that will make them react in a calm manner when they find themselves in an emergency situation. All these combine to form the perfect storm and young drivers are very sensitive.
Curing such difficulties takes deliberate action. First, teens need to realize that they are vulnerable in order to commit to safe driving to themselves. This includes disengaging the phone, having fewer passengers until they can be experienced, and making no shortcuts, which take away security. The development of the instincts required to drive in the real world may be assisted by experience in supervised driving, most of which is best done under conditions not directly applicable in the real world, such as driving in various weather and traffic situations. Above all, a safe drive should not be considered as a burden but rather a benchmark of maturity and respect to life.
I got first-hand experience of the necessity of safe habits when I was a senior in high school. I had a very good friend who passed the driver's license and decided to drive three of his friends home after an all-night study session. He was weary and when one of the passengers made a joke to make him drive full throttle, he succumbed. Seconds afterward, the automobile weaved its way to avoid a parked car, crossed the curb and hit a tree. Amazingly, none suffered a severe injury, but the car was a complete write-off, and the emotional imprint did not go away in days or even months. That was an eye-opener to me. My life changed because I understood that a safe driving practice is not a one-sided good; keeping to the rules does not mean that you care about your life and the life of other people. There was one decision that would have ruined four destinies that night. Rather it acted as a wake up call to all of us.
What then can we do as a community? Safety of teen drivers needs to be promoted on the three-tier level of teens, schools, and neighborhoods. Tweens and teens can be role models, who take a pledge to drive without the phone and urge their peers to call police in case they feel unsafe. Traffic safety can be taught in schools as part of health lessons and an event may be arranged with a presentation of personal experiences of road crash survivors or police. Communities may form secure-driving advertising, draft parent-young driver contracts, and give rise to graduated driver licensing laws that restrained high-hazard circumstances of young drivers, e.g., driving it at night and having more than one passenger in the car.
Technology is the ally too. Teen drivers can be held accountable using apps that block incoming messages and calls at the wheel or keep track of speed. Messages about safe driving can be conveyed through social media campaigns generated by students in a more human manner. Once the youth gets to own the issue it becomes contagious.
To sum it up, teen driver safety is not an issue of the prevention of an accident, but a matter of the development of corporate culture, of responsibility and respect to another life. The recommended driver training forms the basis but real movement has been seen once the teens, school and the whole community have been engaged to ensure that safety is a collective concern. Whenever a teen decides to turn his or her phone off, drive slower, or talk out, he or she is not only preventing a ticket, but they are preserving lives. And that, after all, is the sort of influence which goes a long way down the road.