Think back to that moment when you were rewarded your driver's license. Remember how good it felt to be told you could finally be driving by yourself. The freedom you knew you would be receiving from it. Now place yourself in this scenery, hot summer day, windows down, the wind blowing through your hair, your favorite songs playing on the radio. Then you pick your friends up to go for a drive. You wanna show off to them so you decide, “ah what the heck, I can go over the speed limit, they will think I am really cool “. So you make that decision. You decide to go 70 in a 45, then BOOM. You crash into a tree. Your airbags are deployed, your ears are ringing and you try to make sure your friends are okay. None of them are responding and the guilt hits you. You keep thinking, “are they okay, why won’t they talk to me”? Later on, once you are transported to a hospital you get told one of your friends passed away. Your friend's parents lost their child due to your reckless driving. Let all of this sink in. The bad choices you decide to make while you're behind the wheel can seriously affect you and other drivers around you for the rest of your life.


As a student who took driver's education, it truly did change my perspective on the way I was driving. Some things you do while driving, you don’t even realize can be dangerous to yourself and other drivers on the road with you. You think that going 40 in a 30 will get you to your location faster but it doesn’t, the only thing you are getting faster at doing is getting yourself in a car accident.


According to a study conducted by the University of Nebraska, “Young drivers who have completed driver's education are 75 percent more likely to get a traffic ticket, 24 more percent likely to be involved in a fatal or injury accident and 16 percent more likely to have an accident, the study showed”. So this study shows that drivers who get the education are more likely to be safe drivers than drivers who don’t take drivers education.


Personally I think the steps that need to be taken to help reduce driving related deaths is to educate young drivers more. For example, when I took driver's education, I had to pay 200 dollars. I can proudly say it did help me a lot with my driving and it taught me to be more safe and cautious while on the road. But the one problem I found with it was that it was too expensive. Some students in my school wanted to take it but their families couldn’t afford it. So I believe the pricing of drivers education should be lowered so more young drivers can be taught to be more cautious while on the road.


Now I have thankfully never been in an accident or have had families in an accident but I have witnessed how much accidents can affect families and an entire community. I come from a small town in Upstate New York, but in the town that is very connected to mine there were these two teenagers who got into a fatal accident. With how popular social media is nowadays, everyone saw the full story. The weather conditions were not made to be driving in and the car crossed the lanes into oncoming traffic. The driver died on the scene and the passenger was in very critical condition and died a week later. I personally never knew them but a lot of my friends and peers knew them and you could see how wonderful these two teenagers were. Just from scrolling on social media you could see the community coming together in honor of these two wonderful souls and you could see how badly it affected their families. On top of that, their car hit another car head on and the driver and passenger in the other vehicle were in very critical condition. It was a very hard time and the two souls will be missed and are still missed months later.



So the next time you get behind the wheel, drive safely. Educate yourselves on the importance of safe driving. Who cares if your friends think that you're not cool because you won’t speed or won’t do a daring thing and swerve on the road. Always remember that your driving affects you and others on the road.