Standing In The Lane

The third question is the one I have to answer first, because my answer is no.

I have never been in a car accident. I do not have a friend who was killed or a relative who drives drunk. I could write that essay and it would probably score better than this one. But I am not going to. This is what I actually have.

After Hurricanes Nicole and Milton hit Flagler Beach, Florida, I cleared debris with a volunteer group called Flagler Strong. That work puts you in the street. Not beside it. In it, bent over, both hands full of somebody's roof, in a residential neighborhood where the speed limit is twenty-five and the actual speed is not.

I watched a lot of drivers approach a group of people standing in their lane. Most of them slowed down. A meaningful number did not, and of those, the ones that scared me were not the aggressive drivers. They were the drivers who simply had not seen us yet and then had to do everything at once. You can tell the difference from the ground. An aggressive driver moves early and moves smoothly. A driver who has just looked up brakes late, swerves wide, and their head snaps toward you a half second after the car has already started changing direction. That half second is the entire subject of driver education.

So, the first question. What is driver education for.

It is not for teaching people the rules. Almost everyone who kills somebody with a car knew the rule they broke. The speed limit is posted. Everyone knows about texting. Knowing was never the bottleneck. Driver education is for building the specific automatic behaviors that fire before conscious thought gets there, because at highway speed conscious thought arrives too late to be useful. Where your eyes go at an intersection. Whether your foot is already covering the brake when a ball comes out from between two parked cars. Those are motor habits, and habits are built by repetition under supervision, which is exactly what a real driver education program is and exactly what a multiple-choice module is not.

Second question. What actually reduces the deaths.

Start by moving the fix off the phone. Every distracted driving countermeasure we have deployed runs on the device whose entire design is engineered to interrupt you. Do Not Disturb While Driving is a setting, and a setting is a thing you turn off. The vehicle is a better place for that control. The car knows its own road speed and whether it is in gear. A car that suppresses notifications by default whenever it is rolling, and that requires the vehicle to be stopped and a physical control pressed before it will stop suppressing them, removes the decision from the exact moment a person is least equipped to make it. I am an electrical and computer engineering student at Georgia Southern University, and I think this is a solved engineering problem sitting behind an unsolved policy problem.

Second, graduated licensing with teeth on the hours, not the months. A provisional period that expires on a calendar rewards waiting. One that expires on logged supervised hours rewards driving with an adult in the car, which is the thing that actually builds the habits.

Third, put vulnerable road users into the road test itself. Make the examiner require the new driver to call out motorcycles, cyclists and people working in the roadway, out loud, while driving. Score it. Attention is a habit and habits respond to being graded.

Fourth, fund debris removal like a safety function. After both storms, material sat in travel lanes for days. A shingle is nothing under a car tire and it will put a motorcycle down. Nobody logs it, nobody clocks the response, so nobody manages it.

Fourth question, and this is the one I have to answer about myself.

I was diagnosed with autism at five years old. One consequence for me is that I am slow to filter an environment that is throwing a lot at me at once, and a car at speed is exactly that environment. So the honest answer to how I become a safer driver is that I reduce the number of things happening. The phone goes in the back, not the console. I do not eat while driving. I plan the route before the car moves, because working out an exit while approaching it is the failure mode I know I have.

For other people, the thing I can actually do is the thing I already do. My father is a commercial construction project manager. This fall I built an agent system that pulls my assignment deadlines out of six separate course systems and verifies every date against the source it came from, and then I taught him the same workflow and he runs it on live projects. That is what I am good at, taking a process people are doing badly from memory and making it checkable.

Two people honked at us while we were dragging branches out of that lane. Not to warn us. Because we were in the way.