On August 16, 2022 I left my house that moring not knowing within the next few hours I would be lying in a ditch in a totaled vehicle. Before we start driving by ourselves, we have to take a course about the dangers of driving and how to keep ourselves and others safe on the road. Every time we step into our cars and sit in the drivers seat we now become responsible for ourselves and everyone else on the road.
The drivers education course my be lengthy but it is worth every second of a drivers time. I have personally had to use what I learned in drivers education to help me stop my car when the brakes went out of my vehicle. Providing drivers education can help keep so many people safe on the road. A car is basically a giant metal death machine, so many things could go wrong when someone drives a vehicle. The importance of drivers education is to produce safe, smart, and alert drivers who understand the severity of safety when driving a vehicle. According to the CDC there will be over 3,000 deaths caused by distracted driving, 400 of those deaths caused by texting and driving. A statistic from the Natonal HIghway Trafice Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed on their Alcohol Impared Driving Safety Fact Sheet that there were 13,384 people who died in crashes that involved alcohol impairment in 2021. More recent statistics for 2023 from the NHTSA showed that one-third of crash fatalities are caused by drunk driving. According to the World Health Organatiztion there are 1.3 million deaths a year world wide caused by car accidents. There are also hundreds of deaths caused each year by vehicles not being properly serviced and driving correctly. Drivers education is important, so as we move forward into the future we have more educated drivers that understand the severity of drinking and driving, driving distracted, and properly serving their vehicles.
Drivers education is also so important so drivers know how to handle problems that arise while driving like their brakes failing. Two years ago my brake on my front passenger side completely went out when I was driving home from church. I came to a point on my drive where I was almost home and I had to stop in the road because the car in front of me was trying to make a left had turn and was waiting for cars to pass. I had started to stop a decent amount of distance behind but as I continued to get closer, I noticed that my foot was all the way to the floor with my brake pedal and I was not stoping. I had remembered from my drivers education course that if your brakes were to ever fail, pump your brakes and pull the emergency brake, and that is exactly what I did. That helped me stop and kept me from hitting the car in front of me. I would have not known what to do, if I did not take drivers education and just went on the road by myself with no training on what to do in a situation like that.
Drivers education is also important so that we have educated drivers that understand when and where they can drive. I had just left my school campus and turned out onto the road, when in a matter of seconds I was hit off the road by a tractor trailer. The tractor trailer had changed lanes while the back half of his truck was in the intersection I had just turned out at, which I later learned that changing lanes in the middle of a intersection was illegal. The importance of taking drivers education is to produce drivers who can keep others safe on the road and themselves and understand how easily it is to wreck, but also how preventable a wreck is.
Every driver has free will but with drivers education we can put emphasis on safety. There could be sections added onto the course that allows or mandates every drivers education course provider to show how severe the consequences can be if a driver is unsafe while operating a vehicle. Some drivers still may ignore the statistics but if there is any way that someone can share a story about how distracted driving, drunk driving, or just someone driving unsalfey in a vehicle is that might help more drivers understand how much responsibility they have when they operate a vehicle. As for myself I can help make myself a better and safer driver by thinking about how easily a wreck can happen by just recklessly driving and how easliy I could hurt someone but not paying attention while I drive. I also want to help others drive more safe and I do try and tell my story of my wreck in order to show people that they shoud be more aware when they are driving and not change lanes in the middle of an intersection. I can also help make my friends better drivers by telling them to put their phones away when they are driving and, especially if I am in the car with them. Driving is a privilege but can easly become a dangerous privilege in a matter of seconds. It is important to have drivers education to provide statistics and learning experiences in the classroom before it happens in real life and the actions cannot be reversed. We need to keep the world safe and that starts with one simple course that helps produce safer and more responsible drivers.