The Weight of the Wheel

The first time I got into an accident, I was only two minutes away from getting home. We were at the part of the drive where you’re surrounded by the places that your life was made up of. CVS for gauze that time I badly scraped my knee up in the rain. Rita’s for those scalding hot summer days. Wawa for their incredibly unhealthy cookies n’ cream milkshakes. I could walk from my house to them. We were so close. We were driving past Tastee Sub when it happened. From our left came a gray SUV trying to turn into it. No one was harmed, but our driver’s side door was so messed up, my mom had to climb over the console to the passenger seat to get out. That door never opened again. It took quite a while to fish out the cash for an entirely new car. She didn’t bother trying to get it fixed because it was old; it constantly needed to be taken to the shop even before all this. Besides, buying a used car would be less money than repairing the damage.

The second time I got into an accident, I was two minutes away from my first Halloween house party. I was extremely nervous as it was, not really being a partyer. I was also nervous because my friend, and our driver for the night, had just gotten her license the day before. And she was on edge because her mom didn’t know where we were really going. We got to the place way too early, so we decided to go somewhere else nearby to kill time. How I wish we had just waited. This time, we were on a side street connected to the main road. Just as we approached the stop sign at the intersection, the driver’s mom called. She looked down at the screen, scared about getting caught, but knowing that her mom would worry if she didn’t get back to her soon. In the few seconds she glanced at the phone, her foot was still on the gas. We rolled into the middle of the road as a small grey car came at us from the left. It was still a good distance away, so I was watching for a few seconds as it grew closer. I know everyone says this, but when you can see it coming at you, it really does feel like it’s in slow-motion. No one was severely harmed this time, either. But seeing as that car t-boned us at a decent speed, both vehicles were totaled beyond repair, especially the one that had the right-of-way. A cop car was right behind us and saw the whole thing, so we didn’t have to call. We waited by the side of the road with the police for my mom to pick us up. We dropped off the driver last. She had a panic attack by the spot we parked our car in. She felt terrible about the accident and what happened to her mom’s SUV. They, too, were without a vehicle for a while. And that was the end of our Halloween night.

To highlight one of my own faults, I used to only look in the side mirror before lane-switching. I almost crashed into a car doing this. This sedan was only slightly behind me, making it so that I couldn’t see it in the mirror, but was close enough to hit it if I moved over. Thankfully, they honked at me before I could fully make the switch, and that’s how I learned I had to check my blind spot as well as my mirror before switching lanes. Taking note of what I could’ve done in a particular situation and adapting how I drive based on that is how I reduce the risk of an accident. 

To reduce driving deaths, our towns can look at specific intersections, or other areas, that have an abnormally high rate of accidents and rework them to correct whatever is confusing drivers. That would be a big help. Take my second accident, for example. The scene of that crash has a long history of similar incidents, according to one of the cops that were there that night. That right there is a weak spot that the town should be trying to improve instead of accepting as a norm. Something else that we can all work on individually is silencing our phones when we are driving. If we can’t hear notification sounds, we won’t be tempted to look. Another thing is making sure we check our blind spots and then signal before we turn or switch lanes. This is something drivers should be doing anyway, but sometimes people forget. But we can’t afford to. We have to stay vigilant.

Driver education is a must for reducing car accident deaths. It all starts there. The teachers have to be knowledgeable, yes, but the students must be open as well. If you don’t know basic rules and/or can’t apply them in a real-world situation, it can end in catastrophe. Students have to be willing to listen and truly dedicate themselves to learning the material. They have to understand that they hold real people’s lives in their hands, including their own. We all do.