Why do cars look like people? Since I was a child peering out the window on a long road trip across the country, I have always seen funny faces on the front of cars. Every car is different with a unique personality to match the driver. The headlights look like eyes that sometimes slant down and make the car look mad, but other times they are open big and might even have added lashes! Then of course the grill gives a nice smile to friendly cars or a scary look to race cars. Sometimes on old car can have a wide grill that gives a friendly mustache look. On my long drives after seeing a fun car, I would stretch up on my booster seat to see the driver. Surprisingly, the driver usually matched the car they were in.
While the look of each car may give them personalities of their own, we cannot forget that there is a human inside the car with an even more complex and beautiful personality within. Most fresh drivers give their car a name because it makes it more personal and not just a piece of machinery. But if teens have this strange attachment to their vehicle, why do they race it around town like they are F1 drivers racing for a million dollars? When did the Apple Maps app turn into a real-life game of how many minutes a driver can shave off of their ETA? Driving is not a game. And it is definitely not a solo player game either.
We drive within a community and each day we drive by thousands of cars on a commute within the safe space of four car doors and a large steering wheel. With that these numerous car-to-car interactions, driving safety is no longer a personal agenda, but a public issue of utmost importance. How will someone learn how to be a safe driver without beneficial safe lessons from an education program followed by a comprehensive driving test? A driving test currently holds the role of ensuring that drivers can safely drive through neighborhood streets, which is all that I was tested on. The reality is most drivers do not only drive on neighborhood streets and most wrecks are on busier roads. So why do driving tests not ensure that teens can confidently drive on major roads and highways before granting a license? Communities need to rewrite the driving test routes to ensure a variety of street type capabilities before teens have a free pass to the world.
Yet, it is not solely the individual teenager’s fault for struggling to have safe habits. With their own set of keys comes a matching set of roadblocks to safe driving. If you are the first person among your friends to get a driver's license and a car, there is a huge pressure to break the law and fill your car with friends, rather than limiting capacity to one passenger. In response, communities and parents can be more attentive to offering their kids rides to prevent a full car with an under experienced driver or a new driver. In my family, my parents added the policy that I could not ride with a friend until they had their license for six months and I was not allowed to take a friend as passenger for the first six month without permission. This helped me to gain driving confidence before I had the distraction of a friend talking to me while I was driving.
A new driver is not always ready to drive on metroplex highways, but that does not stop many from the big tollways. My fingers clinched onto my seat as I visually checked my seatbelt security as I rode with my freshly licensed friend home from an event. I was blissfully unaware that she was not allowed to drive on tollways (and for a reason). As I watched her speedometer raise scarily high, she even remarked through laughter that she was not allowed to be on the tollway, but I was quietly thinking that it was not as funny as she thought it was. While no wreck occurred, her swerving could have caused one during a busier hour. This proves the need for more parent involvement in what roads their teens are driving on. A solution could look like downloading an app like Life 360 that alerts parents when kids drive on highways or exceed a set speed. This would reduce the rule breaking reckless speeds found in my experience.
An underrated problem among teens is the lack of seriousness when someone has a fender-bender or pops a tire, they simply laugh it off rather than acknowledging that part of their beloved car with a smiling face was defiled. We must reel it in so that having a wreck does not receive lighthearted laughter in response, but rather a reflection and response toward more focused driving.
Who better to take action than the place teens spend a great amount of time-school. But the solution lays not in more rules or restrictions, but in the kind principle of grace. If schools gave more leniency and grace on morning tardiness, students would not be tempted to speed during their morning commute to school in order to avoid a punishment. Without the need to speed to school, students would start their day off calmer and be more focused on their drive rather than beginning their day in chaos.
Each car has a face that points to a driver worth protecting and educating. The importance of driver safety cannot be understated, and it is no longer a personal problem but the responsibility of the community. As I drive down the street now, I still laugh at the grills that make large moustaches, or big eyelashes over headlights with smiling grills, but it now reminds me of the person operating the car. The driver is even more unique and worth protecting.