In the Driver's Seat Scholarship Essay

Brayden Bender

February 10th, 2020

In the Driver’s Seat Scholarship Essay

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration‘s 2016 Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes report, 94 percent of car crashes are caused by human negligence and error. That means, that out of the 34,000 people that die a year in fatal car accidents, 31,960 of those lives can be saved if everyone collectively drove safer. So, how do we get people to drive safer?

The easiest answer to this is to better educate people on the dangers of driving, but the problem with that answer is that some people don’t listen. Some people will always say “It won’t be me” when you show them the statistics. Although some of those people are scared of flying in airplanes even though the average person living in the United States has a 1 in 102 chance of dying in a car crash, compared to a 1 in 205,552 chance of dying as a passenger on an airplane.

I propose a different solution, a more creative solution to the problem of unsafe driving. I propose we scare people into driving safer. When I was a sophomore my father was driving me to school, and we drove over some black ice at a higher than legal speeds. Us and the vehicle flipped and landed in a ditch my father was injured and I was very scared. To this day I am still fearful of driving faster than the speed limit, especially in the winter. Of course, I don’t think we should force new drivers into traumatic experiences in order to get them to drive safer, but perhaps a frightening advertisement about the horror of car accidents. Better yet a scary movie all about car accidents. The movie Jaws scared people from beaches for months after its release, if someone could make a movie like that about cars, it might save some lives.

It might be a little outside the box, but I think that’s exactly what we need to get people to drive safer. The tragedy of fatal car accidents needs to be stopped or at the minimum decreased, and all that’s been done so far hasn’t exactly worked. So maybe, just maybe we need to try something a little outside the box.

Citations:

Brown, Bruce. “2016 NHTSA Fatality Report Adds to Evidence for Self-Driving Cars.” Digital Trends, Digital Trends, 7 Oct. 2017, www.https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/2016-nhtsa-fatality-report/.

Sansone & Lauber. “Odds of Dying in a Car or Plane Crash in Missouri: Sansone & Lauber.” Sansone and Lauber, 19 Jan. 2020, www.missourilawyers.com/blog/fatal-car-accident-odds/.