Why Awareness Matters

Why Awareness Matters

An Entry to the Drivers ed Initiative Scholarship

Driver Education is vitally important in reducing the number of deaths related to driving, it gives people more knowledge on how to drive safely and what to do or not to do while driving in order to protect themselves or others. In the U.S, 1.2 million people die from car crashes each year, which means that alarming numbers of people are dying, usually in mass amounts. Not many people seem to realize this, but driving is a two-way street, what you do on the road can and most likely will affect other drivers around you. This is the main reason why so many people die from just crashes alone, usually there is more than one person involved in the crash with only one person causing the crash themselves. How crashes occur also vary, most crashes occur because of oblivious mistakes such as missing a stop sign or carelessness such as driving while drunk. Many of these issues are fixable and it wouldn’t take that much effort to do so either, all it would take is a little bit of self-awareness and and small changes as to how you drive.

There are many steps that people can take in order to prevent getting into a severe accident on the road, one of the common causes of accidents is texting while driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Administration, 3,166 people died from distracted driving in 2017, six percent of those drivers, ranging from the ages fifteen to sixteen. Although there are other ways to be unsafe on the road this main cause is most prominent in teenagers and young adults, however, it’s easily fixable. In order to stop distracted driving somebody can easily put their phones down and not look at it while they’re driving, or simply put their phones on “do not disturb”, an option that stops all notifications from appearing on the phone, during their drive if they have to.

As for personal experience I haven’t been in any car accidents, however I have witnessed one family member drive irresponsibly from time to time. My mother has a bad texting while driving habit, although it only happens once in a while, she will occasionally check her phone while she’s driving or answer a text. Whenever I catch her doing it I tell her to put the phone down or simply hand it to me so I can write what she wants to say, she gets annoyed and teases me about it but she knows my intentions are well. As for myself, I am also aware that I have that nasty habit of picking my phone up whenever I get a notification. Because of this, whenever I’m out driving with my father I make sure to put my phone in my purse and put it on his side under his feet, that way it’s out of my sight and out of my reach as well.