You stare at the card in your hands, your own smiling face staring right back at you, numbers and letters printed beside the familiar portrait. Your driver’s license shines underneath the light of the sun, and you recognize, faintly, that the world is in your hands. With this, you can get behind the wheel on your own, drive off, go to your city park that is five minutes away or take a ten-hour-long road trip across multiple states. Whatever you decide, you know that the choice is yours and yours alone. This newfound independence tastes like freedom, and you cannot wait to put it into practice. However, driving has far deeper implications than just freedom. In a vehicle, you, the driver, are responsible for your life, the lives of the people in the backseat, and the lives of everyone else on the road. About 34,000 people in the U.S. die every year from vehicular accidents. With proper education regarding teen driver safety—where the importance of protecting lives is emphasized—many of these tragedies could have been avoided.
Scenario 1. You are driving home from school when you hear a bright, twinkling sound from your phone. The device sits in the cupholder below the screen display, and although your hands are on the wheel and your foot is on the gas pedal, you decide to glance at it anyway. It’s a text from your best friend, but the notification disappears just as quickly as it came. In a brief moment of rebellion, you steer the wheel with your left hand and pick up the phone with your right. Your attention has effectively been halved, and now, a multitude of events could unfold as a result of your recklessness; one, you run straight through an intersection at a red light, unable to swerve away from the truck heading perpendicular towards you; two, the car in front of you stops suddenly, and you are not prepared to do the same; three, there is a sharp turn up ahead that you thought there was no warning for, but in reality, you had been too distracted to heed the sign a couple yards back. Texting while driving—and engaging with a phone in general—is one of the most common examples of a distraction that can put a driver in an absent headspace while on the road. Minimizing distractions is simple yet life-saving. Keep your eyes on the road. Reduce conversation with anyone else in the vehicle. Turn your phone on silent and place it down and facing away from you to curb the temptation of looking at it.
Scenario 2. You are driving down a busy road in town after watching a movie at the theaters. Your friends are in the car with you because you had offered to bring them home after, and there are three of them, one in the passenger’s seat and two in the back. They have rolled down the windows on each side and laugh at just about every joke, every spoken word between each other. You, however, are focused on the road. The limit here is forty; you take care to follow it because you know the dangers. But you also value the input of your friends (the truth is that you would follow them wherever they go, and you would do whatever they asked of you). Your friend sticks his head out the window and says, “Go faster,” because his mom told him to be home at seven. The others clamor in agreement, and you step a little harder on the pedal, put a little more weight into the push, and you have climbed to a cautious forty-five. By the time you get to the outskirts of town, it is fifty, then fifty-five, but the fact is that the limit is still forty. When you are pulled over for a ticket, you recognize, faintly, that while you complied with the demands of your friends, you are ultimately the one who is at fault. Peer pressure is a serious issue that is most prevalent in teenage drivers. This comes as a consequence of wanting to fit in, wanting to make friends and avoid letting those friends down. Thousands of teens become victims of peer pressure everyday, in situations both related and unrelated to driving. When you are the one in control of the car, it is up to you to ensure the safety of the lives around you and decide what is the best course of action to take.
Scenario 3. You are driving on the highway at seventy miles-per-hour, completely even with the limit. But above, the skies turn dark and gray, and the soft pitter-patter of rain becomes a torrential downpour. Your car’s windshield wipers work furiously to clear your view. Despite the road being drowned out, you remain at seventy, because that’s the speed limit, right? What you fail to understand is that slowing down during inclement weather is key to avoiding hydroplaning, or the skidding of your vehicle’s tires on water instead of the ground. Something similar happened to me on the summer highway. Beforehand, I had had little experience with driving in the rain; usually, I drove when the weather was fair. It was difficult to see through the windshield, and although I had slowed down marginally, it hadn’t been enough. I was driving a small car, and I heard its tires shudder. I braked immediately and watched the speedometer fall from sixty to forty. From then until I got out of the rain, I drove slowly. In that situation, I was luckier than my aunt, whose car had slid into a ditch a few years ago. It was raining hard, my parents told me, and she didn’t slow down enough on a sharp turn. Thankfully, she didn’t lose her life, though her car was in bad condition. After my own brush with hydroplaning, I knew that I lacked the proper experience to be driving on the highway in the rain.
Teen drivers face a plethora of challenges when it comes to operating a vehicle: distractions, peer pressure, and lack of experience, to name a few. For a week, every teenager enrolls in driving school and receives instruction for the required hours. We learn the dangers, what the colors and symbols mean, how to play it safe—but is it taken seriously? Most kids learn by example. They see what their parents do and replicate all of their wrongs. They think it’s fine, because their parents have been driving them for years, and nothing’s happened yet. So, why shouldn’t they drive like everyone else who came before them?
We cannot just know the risks. We have to understand them. Teens should gain more experience on the road with instructors before they are sent off to do it alone. Schools should enforce the rules and encourage safety first. Communities should set a better example by putting down the phone while driving, obeying the speed limit regardless of what someone in the passenger seat says, and slowing down in the rain. Promoting safe driving among teenage drivers takes the effort of everyone around them. If we can learn to educate by example, then the road—and its drivers—will be much safer.