The
Importance ofEducation for Driver Safety
By
Lisa Reynoso


How can we make our roads a safer place? When we realize that the
number of deaths per year exceeds the number of deaths in Iraq and
Afghanistan combined, the necessity of educating drivers in safe
driving habits becomes self evident.
I believe that
education is critical when it comes to ensuring that drivers are safe
on the roads. My own experience bears this out. I learned to drive in
a town where all the roads had only one lane each direction, so I
never had the chance to learn to change lanes safely, and no one
taught me. I was homeschooled, so my mom taught me to drive, and in a
way that was very stressful to me. I didn’t have a dispassionate
teacher making sure I learned all the rules; I had a nerve-wracked
mother pointing out all the things I did wrong. This set me up for
trouble later.
I was in a car
accident when I was in my early twenties. The traffic was slowing
down, and ahead I saw a policeman waving his arms. I had not been
driving long, and I was puzzled as to what he was doing. In the short
time I spent looking at him and trying to figure out what he was
trying to get the cars to do, the car in front of me slowed, and I
rear-ended them at roughly 5 miles per hour. No one was hurt, but my
car was a wreck. I have also had several near misses in changing
lanes when I failed to look beside me. I believe that better
education and practice would have prevented my accident and kept me
safer in general.

Since then, I
have learned to be more attentive to my driving. I keep my phone
hands-free and focus on the road and the cars around me. I pull over
if I need to look up something (like an address), and generally focus
on what is going on around me and what the other cars might be doing.
There are several
things I believe we can do to reduce the number of deaths related to
driving. One would be more education campaigns, whether through
drivers ed or in advertisements. Another would be better
enforcement of the rules of the road, whether it be speeding or cell
phone use or other practices. Insurance companies could offer
discounts to drivers who take a defensive driving course every five
years. Parents could discuss safe driving with their children when
they are young, so that when they reach driving age, they have
already developed a mindset of safety.

In summary, safe
driving should be a priority for every individual who gets behind the
wheel of a vehicle, and education is the way to achieve this goal.