It was late on a Saturday night. The dark night was all my family and I could see after we left a function held at one of our close family friend’s house. It was clear that both my parents had been drinking throughout the night. My mom, who had to be walked to the passenger seat, was now partially asleep on the way back home with her head looking up towards the night sky. My dad proclaimed himself to be the most fit to drive us back home. I offered to drive us home since he had been drinking with my mom all night long, but he insisted. I wanted no arguments between him and I as he has always been the one to drive us back home after he and my mom have been drinking, so I figured this time would be no different than before. We were nearing our house as I could feel every familiar left and right turn we took. On the highway, I decided to rest my eyes as it was late at night, and I was not used to being up this late. A few minutes later, I felt myself move from side to side slightly. It was my dad swerving in and out of the middle lane on I-820 at 60 miles per hour that woke me from my attempted sleep. I immediately told him to wake up and stop the car or he’ll kill all of us. That night ended with me driving my family home, and with me having a looming sense of stupidity for having let my dad drive us in that condition.
According to the NHTSA, an average of 34,000 people die each year due to driving. There are many factors that contribute to these statistics, and while the number of causes of bad driving are varied, they all lead to one or two effects: injury or death. Although the problem and the statistics that accompany it are disturbing in their own right, there is a way to resolve this issue greatly: an increase in the importance of driver education and driver safety.
Driver education is a necessity for anyone who wants to drive on their own. However, a problem transpires when the learner does not maintain the concepts of safety that they learned in class out of either spite, ignorance, or both simultaneously. It is imperative that people have common sense while driving as it is an activity that demands your complete, undivided attention at all times. People may ask how important driver education is in lowering the number of annual driver deaths, and my answer to their question would be: how much do you value your own safety? Do you care deeply about wanting to stay safe in all aspects of your life, or is your safety worth as much as fool’s gold? These are questions that have such simple answers, yet some choose to overcomplicate the situation and attempt to justify why they do what they do. It’s not a question of whether you feel as though you should be exempt from wearing a seatbelt because it “asphyxiates” you, for example. This is a matter of life or death. Death on the road is a serious problem in this country that truly should not be a problem at all, but peoples’ ignorance has caused a large majority of the problem.
The first piece of advice that people should take in order to start being safer on the roads is keep your eyes on the road and not on distracting things such as your phone or your surroundings. With this advice alone, driver safety has already increased tenfold. Second, become properly educated with the rules of the road and how to navigate. It’s baffling how many people will not use their turn signal or go through an intersection when it is clearly someone else’s turn to go. And lastly, have some common sense while on the road. As mentioned before, driving is something that requires all your attention as you are traveling at high speeds most of the time. Driver education and driver safety are two things that go hand in hand with each other. If you are educated in driving, then you will know how to keep yourself safe on the roads. It’s a simple but all-encompassing relationship of ideals. If we can learn to educate ourselves better, we will solve this grim problem that has turned the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on their heads in the last few years.