The Language of Chance: Why Driving Deaths Aren't Accidents

Two years ago, my phone rang late at night. It was one of my closest friends, calling from Vancouver, and I could barely understand her through the sobbing. Her boyfriend had been killed in a car accident. It was around one in the morning. He had been at a party with friends from university, and on the drive back he was going too fast to react when an obstacle appeared in the road ahead of him. He wrenched the wheel to the right, but it was too late, and the car crashed. One moment he was driving home the way he had a hundred times before; the next, he was gone. I remember sitting in silence after we hung up, unable to process how something so ordinary, driving, could take someone's life so suddenly and permanently. That phone call changed the way I think about roads, cars, and the responsibility that comes with holding a steering wheel. It also convinced me of something I now believe firmly: we do not have a driving problem in this country so much as we have a complacency problem, and complacency is a choice we can unmake.

The statistics behind that night are staggering, even if they rarely make headlines the way other tragedies do. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 3,208 people were killed in crashes affected by distraction in 2024 alone, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of preventable death among American teenagers. The risk is not spread evenly across all drivers, either. Per mile driven, drivers between the ages of 16 and 19 have a fatal crash rate nearly three times higher than drivers over 20, and newly licensed teens are up to four times more likely to crash than experienced adults, largely because they have not yet learned to recognize danger before it becomes unavoidable. That risk climbs even further after dark: the fatal crash rate for teen drivers between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. is roughly three times that of drivers in their thirties, forties, and fifties. These numbers do not describe some distant, rare catastrophe. They describe an ordinary Friday night drive home from a friend's house, the kind of drive most teenagers take without a second thought. What strikes me most about this data is not the size of the numbers but their predictability. Age, time of day, and experience level are not random variables; they are known, measurable risk factors that we have chosen, collectively, to treat as background noise rather than as a public health emergency deserving the same urgency we would give any other leading cause of preventable death.

Driver education is one of the most effective tools we have for reducing this death toll, because so many driving fatalities are not the result of mechanical failure or unavoidable circumstance. They are the result of human error. Speeding, distracted driving, following too closely, failing to check blind spots, and driving under the influence are all preventable behaviors. A strong driver education program does more than teach someone how to parallel park or pass a written test; it instills an understanding of risk, consequence, and the immense responsibility of controlling a two thousand pound machine at high speed, often surrounded by other vehicles carrying real people with families waiting for them at home. When new drivers are taught defensive driving techniques, how to react in emergency situations, and the real statistics behind reckless behavior, they are far more likely to internalize caution rather than treat driving as routine and free of consequence.

I would go further, though, and argue that the deeper problem is not a lack of driver education but the shallowness of the driver education most people actually receive. In many places, earning a license requires only a handful of practice hours and a short written test built around memorizing signage rather than understanding risk. That is not education; it is a formality designed to move people through a system quickly. A test that measures whether someone can recite the speed limit near a school zone tells us almost nothing about whether that same person will check their mirrors before changing lanes five years later, when the driving has become automatic and the caution has faded. Real driver education should be treated less like a single exam taken once and more like the foundation of a lifelong habit, reinforced through refresher courses, tied to insurance incentives, and revisited whenever crash data reveals a new pattern of risk, the way medical guidelines are updated when new evidence emerges. We do not treat other high stakes skills this way, and I do not think driving should be the exception.

I understand this firsthand, because my own driving education happened in South Korea, where I earned my license and drove for several years before moving back to Canada. When I returned, I found myself genuinely afraid to get behind the wheel again. It was not because I had forgotten how to drive. It was because I was shocked by how aggressively many drivers here behave. Tailgating, weaving between lanes, and speeding through yellow lights felt far more common than what I had grown used to. That contrast made something clear to me: driving culture is not fixed. It is shaped by what we are taught, what we see modeled by other drivers, and what behavior gets normalized on the road. If aggressive driving is treated as ordinary, it will keep costing lives. Driver education has the power to reset that norm before dangerous habits ever take hold.

What unsettled me most was not any single aggressive driver, but how unbothered everyone else seemed to be by it. A car cutting across three lanes without signaling barely drew a honk. This is, I think, the real danger of a normalized risk culture: once a behavior becomes common enough, it stops registering as dangerous at all, even to the people who would otherwise recognize it instantly as reckless. Psychologists call this phenomenon risk normalization, and it explains why so many drivers who would never dream of running a red light will comfortably glance at a text message at sixty miles an hour. The second behavior has simply been seen too many times to feel like a violation anymore. If we accept that culture shapes behavior this powerfully, then the uncomfortable conclusion is that every driver who shrugs off a near miss instead of naming it out loud is quietly lowering the bar for everyone else on the road. Changing that culture is not a soft, secondary goal alongside driver education and enforcement; I would argue it is the precondition that makes both of those things work at all.

Reducing driving deaths requires action on multiple fronts, and some of the most effective ones are also the simplest. Nationally, seatbelt use sits above 91 percent, yet CDC data shows that in fatal crashes involving teen drivers and passengers, more than half of those killed were not wearing one at the time. That gap alone, between a habit most people already know they should have and what actually happens in the moments that matter most, shows how much of this problem comes down to consistency, not awareness. First, driver education should be more rigorous and mandatory, not just a formality to obtain a license. Programs should include real exposure to the consequences of reckless driving, whether through simulations, testimonials from crash survivors, or partnerships with local hospitals and first responders who see the aftermath firsthand. Second, stricter and more consistently enforced penalties for distracted driving and speeding would help deter the behaviors that cause the most accidents; a law only changes behavior if people believe it will actually be enforced. Third, infrastructure improvements, such as better lighting, clearer signage, protected turn lanes, and rumble strips on highway shoulders, can reduce the margin for human error even when a driver makes a mistake. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need a cultural shift where speaking up about unsafe driving, whether it is a friend checking their phone at a red light or a family member driving after drinking, is seen as an act of care rather than an overreaction.

Some people push back on this kind of argument by pointing out that driving is an inherently risky activity, that human error can never be fully engineered or educated away, and that a certain number of deaths is simply the cost of a society built around personal vehicles. I understand the impulse behind that view, and I do not think it is made in bad faith. But I disagree with it, and my own two countries are the reason why. South Korea, where I learned to drive, spent years near the top of the OECD for road deaths per capita. Then, largely through a national road safety plan built around stricter enforcement, redesigned intersections, and sustained public education, the country cut its road fatalities by roughly half between 2012 and 2022, even as the number of registered vehicles kept climbing. That is not a story about a naturally cautious culture that got lucky. It is a story about a country that was near the bottom of its peer group on this exact issue and deliberately, methodically changed the outcome. If a nation can cut its own road deaths in half in a decade through policy and culture rather than through some fundamental change in human nature, then the number of driving deaths in any country, including the one I now live in, is not a fixed cost of modern life. It is a number that reflects the choices a society has made, and it can be moved by the choices a society makes next.

The call from my friend in Vancouver is the experience that has shaped my perspective on this issue the most. Her boyfriend was not doing anything unusual that night. He was driving home from a university party, the way countless college students do every weekend. But he was going too fast for the hour and the road, and by the time an obstacle appeared in front of him, there was no time left to react safely. He turned the wheel hard to the right, and the car crashed. In an instant, her entire future changed. She lost her partner, and I lost the ability to think of car accidents as something that happens to strangers on the news. It became personal. I think about her often, and about how a single accident did not just end one life, but reshaped the lives of everyone who loved him. What strikes me now, looking back on it with the statistics I have since learned, is how unremarkable his risk profile was. One in the morning, coming home from a party, a driver in his late teens or early twenties: this is almost exactly the profile the CDC describes when it explains why nighttime crash rates for young drivers run nearly three times higher than for older adults. His death was not a freak occurrence. It was a statistically predictable outcome of a set of conditions that play out on roads across this country almost every single weekend, which is precisely what makes it so hard to sit with. Combined with my own unease about the aggressive driving culture I encountered when I returned to Canada, that experience has made me acutely aware that safety on the road is not guaranteed. It has to be actively chosen, every single time someone starts their car. If there is one belief I hold most strongly after that phone call, it is this: we talk about car accidents using the language of chance, bad luck, wrong place, wrong time, when in reality most of them are the downstream result of specific, identifiable decisions made in the seconds or minutes beforehand. Calling them accidents lets everyone, drivers and policymakers alike, off the hook a little too easily.

I did not need to look far to see that same pattern in someone I know personally. Canada's size means people often cross entire provinces by car rather than by plane, and on one of those long highway drives I was in the passenger seat while a close friend of mine kept pushing well past the posted speed limit for miles at a stretch, closing the gap on slower vehicles ahead with barely any following distance. When I asked them to slow down, they brushed it off and told me everyone drove that fast on that stretch of highway anyway. What stayed with me afterward was not just the speed itself but how unbothered they were by it, and how ordinary they made it sound. I do not think my friend is unusual among people our age. If anything, I have come to believe that my generation has developed a particularly casual relationship with speed on long highway drives, treating a provincial crossing as a kind of open road where the ordinary rules start to feel optional the longer the trip goes on. The statistics I cited earlier are not abstract in moments like that. Newly licensed and younger drivers already carry a fatal crash rate several times higher than older, more experienced drivers, and the kind of behavior I watched from the passenger seat is exactly the pattern that produces those numbers. It is unsettling to realize that the risk described in national data was sitting in the driver's seat next to me, and that I said something and it still was not enough to change what was happening in that moment.

Since that phone call, I have made a deliberate effort to drive more cautiously, even when it means being the slower car in a line of impatient traffic. I give myself extra following distance, I avoid using my phone entirely while driving, and I try to anticipate the mistakes of other drivers rather than assuming everyone around me will act predictably. I have also become more willing to speak up. If a friend or family member is about to drive after drinking, or insists on checking a text message at a stoplight, I say something, even if it feels awkward in the moment, because I know now how permanent the alternative can be.

Beyond my own habits, I want to help shift the culture around driving among people my age. Many young and new drivers, like I once was, are unaware of just how dangerous an ordinary drive can be until something forces them to confront it directly. I plan to share my friend's story, with her permission, in conversations with other new drivers, not to frighten them unnecessarily, but to make the abstract statistics feel real. Numbers like 34,000 deaths a year are easy to scroll past; a story about someone's boyfriend who never made it home from a normal highway drive is not. If I can help even one person take driving more seriously before they are forced to learn the hard way, then something meaningful will have come out of the hardest phone call I have ever received.

Driving is often treated as a mundane, background part of daily life, but the statistics, and my own experience, tell a different story. It is one of the most consequential responsibilities most of us will ever hold, and the difference between a routine commute and a tragedy can come down to a single moment of carelessness. Through better driver education, stronger enforcement, safer infrastructure, and a culture that takes reckless driving seriously, we can bring that death toll down substantially, not to zero, perhaps, but to a fraction of what it is today, if we are willing to stop treating it as inevitable. I do not think that requires a single dramatic policy change. I think it requires a lot of people making the same small decision my friend's story forced on me: to stop calling careless driving normal, and to start calling it what it actually is. I intend to be part of that shift, both behind my own wheel and in the conversations I have with the people I care about.