Better Safe Than Sorry

The importance of driver education lies in the statistics themselves. With many new licensed drivers emerging every day, the likelihood of more accidents is bound to increase. However, if every new driver were to participate in an in-person driver’s education course or program, rather than an online course or through their parents/ guardians, the chances should see some significant decline. Getting professional and hands-on instruction has been hard to come by these past three years due to circumstances surrounding the worldwide pandemic—so there is three years’ worth of licensed drivers whose driving knowledge prior to getting licensed likely came from the teachings of parents or an online class that can be completed with relative ease. While I do not intend to slight the teachings of parents/ guardians and online classes, as I am a product of both, I also understand the importance of taking part in a driving school if you have the opportunity to do so. It is near impossible to prevent accidents from happening, but the more knowledgeable drivers we have on the road, the better it is for everyone operating their vehicle.

The steps needed to reduce driving-related deaths are simple—as mentioned before, step one would be taking part in an in-person driving school/ education program, and the next step would be to implement those teachings whenever you are on the road. Even with those steps, I understand it is never as cut-and-dry as it seems, and there is always potential for someone else to be at fault rather than yourself. For those anomalies that occur on the road, I do not have an answer, other than to do your best to be a defensive driver and be cautious of the drivers around you. Maybe at some point in our lifetime, more accessibility to autonomous driving vehicles could help remedy those anomalies, if autonomous driving is refined enough to be truly viable.

In my life, I have both experienced and heard about others that have gotten into car accidents. My first and only experience with a car accident so far occurred while I still had a learner’s license. On an evening trip from dropping my little cousin off at her house, I was doing well to get back home which was about an hour or so away (with my mother as a passenger). Most of that hour was spent on the interstate, and as the time passed, the busier the road got—it reached a point where everyone was genuinely bumper to bumper, the first time I experienced this behind the wheel. I did not mind the traffic as it would shortly get moving again and I felt good about my performance on the road at the time, but I could not help but notice that as the flow of traffic picked up, the driver behind me was still tailgating me, also a first for me until that point. The traffic eventually came to an abrupt stop again, and the distance between me and the driver ahead was enough for me to safely stop, but I did not trust the reaction time of the driver behind me—I feathered on the brakes to try and flash the brake lights to signal behind me that I was going to stop, but while the gap between the car ahead of me and I was closing, the driver behind me showed no signs of getting off my bumper, so I eventually came to a hard stop as I did not want to hit the car in front of me, but ended up getting rear-ended in the process. Ironically, the driver who rear-ended me was also on her learner’s license as well. After the situation was sorted, my mom drove the rest of the trip and I kept a mental note to just pull off into the shoulder should I end up in that situation again.

Another experience that I know of from one of my close friends happened around this time as well. Unlike me, he was a licensed driver at this point and was on his way home from a late-night shift at work. Due to him being very tired on his way back home, he fell asleep behind the wheel and ended up flipping over in the process. A police officer was there to witness the incident, thankfully he was not injured, and no one was on the road that late into the night—the car was towed, and eventually he was picked up by his mom to end off that night.

Taking from both my friend and I’s experiences, the steps that I and others should take to become safer drivers is to be more aware of what is going on, especially in the late night where things such as fatigue could be affecting one’s driving performance.