I think I’m about to die. Is freshman year too soon to die? Probably. Alex laughs from the driver’s seat. Bradley reaches out of his window to feel the wind. I’m about to throw up. The golden evening sun catches on wide smiles and windblown hair. Everyone looks amazing in concert black. We’re going around 75 miles per hour on country backroads. This should be the coolest teen experience ever—we’re driving from dinner to Sheetz before our last band recital of the year, just me and my cooler, older friends—but I feel terrified.
What if my parents find out?
What if we crash?
We’re still going over 70. That intersection is awfully close. Alex breaks hard, then whips the car around the corner, nearly crashing into a blue pickup. We should have stopped—there was a stop sign—but we didn’t. Nevertheless, we laugh it off. Sort of. Alex drives considerably slower the rest of the drive, though.
It isn’t until I’m lying in bed after the concert that I realize how close we all were to dying. Had the driver of the blue pickup been on his phone, or going a bit faster, or been distracted at all, we could have very likely been caught in a head-on collision. I wonder for a minute about my own mortality and how I’ll drive when I get my license. By the time a couple of weeks have passed, I find myself starting to forget the event.
That was how my first personal experience with reckless teen driving went. Thankfully, I came out unscathed, and hopefully, it will be my last encounter.
When school started again in August, I found myself dreading driver’s ed. I had heard how boring it was from everyone who had already taken the class. Walking into the classroom, I sighed and prepared to have my unimaginative expectations fulfilled, noting the assorted road signs and cautionary posters that decorated the room. I got comfortable in my assigned seat, trying to find a way that I could rest my eyes without looking like I was sleeping. Unfortunately for my scheduled naptime, my driver’s ed teacher was very peppy at 7:30 in the morning, so she started off class with a discussion:
“How many of you think you are or will be a safe driver?”
A few hands went up and glances were thrown across the room.
“How many of you want to be safe drivers?”
A couple more hands were raised.
“How many of you know why teen drivers are statistically the most dangerous drivers?”
There are perhaps two hands up, albeit very discreetly.
“Let’s hear some guesses as to why this is.”
The class mumbles things like “phones,” “crashes,” and “distractions.”
“I heard a lot of good answers there. The truth is, there are a lot of factors that group together to make teen drivers the most dangerous.”
It was one of the most sobering lessons I have ever sat through; I found out that teenagers make up around 4% of all drivers, but are involved in 7% of fatal crashes. On top of being less experienced, we’re more likely to be driving when we’re tired, or emotional, or otherwise mentally distracted. Teenagers are also the main age group known for driving to impress their friends. When I heard that one of the main causes of teen accidents was peer pressure, my mind snapped back to the car ride with Alex and Bradley. Was Alex trying to impress us? He must have been. I worried that one day, I’ll end up in a similar situation, driving others after school and doing something dumb. The thought wasn’t cohesive, but the fear was real. Fortunately, over the next few months, I was graced with a solid driver’s education course and supportive parents.
I gradually learned how to focus better and to hold the wheel at 8 and 4. One of my friends often complained that it felt like the “purpose of the class to scare us so that we wouldn’t drive,” but I found that driver’s education helped me to be aware of my weaknesses as a teen driver, which only made me a more cautious driver. As I became a more practiced driver, I began to notice how my classmates felt about driving. A handful of them openly boasted about how fast they drove with their friends in the car, which made me nervous–would I be expected to speed if I had to give my friends a ride? And what if I was too afraid to drive my friends in the first place? Would I look like a square?
Here is what I now believe the role of driver’s education in teen driver safety to be: to continue to teach the “rules of the road” and also to set the precedent of safe driving as a standard for all teens. Not only is driver’s education important for learning the right of way, but as teens' first truly intentional exposure to driving, it sets a standard for new drivers. My driver’s education teacher helped set a safe standard for my class by assuring us that reckless, speedy driving was not normal behavior and was mainly perpetuated by people who needed to feel an adrenaline rush or acceptance. She also helped us to realize the immediate advantages (i.e. lower insurance payments) of being safer, more focused drivers as well. We knew that we could say no to friends who were pressuring us to give them rides or carry more passengers than we were allowed, and had excuses prepped in case they pushed further. All of these factors helped me to feel more comfortable and prepared as a driver, but there needs to be more initiatives in the general community to advocate for teen safety.
The cultural narrative outside the school seemed to affirm the idea that driving “cool” was more important than driving safe. Videos of drivers doing donuts and drifting on open roads filled my feed and popped up in ads when I searched for information about cars. Pop culture seemed to scream that driving recklessly was normal and standard, when in reality, it wasn’t, and still is not. Just like nicotine products, it felt like reckless driving was being normalized for young people in the media. If we truly want to make the roads safer for everyone, we need to start by making teens safer, and to do that, we need to push for regulations on how driving, specifically reckless driving, is promoted. If driver’s education is brought beyond the walls of a classroom and into mainstream culture, then thousands of lives could be saved from preventable reckless driving deaths.