Normalizing Driver Education

As a Peace & Conflict major, I am absolutely invested in community care and solutions for improving what the Greeks called “our good life together” as neighbors. Though I focus quite a bit on community action within international issues (i.e., I am hoping to work for an embassy to broker responsible relationships across nation-state lines), there are some problems within our public lives that are more ubiquitous and close-to-home. One of those is the frightening increase of automobile accidents and driver deaths as a result of contemporary phenomena such as driving-while-texting and other forms of distracted driving. We often may not think about it this way, but the sheer numbers of people killed in these accidents ought to be considered along the lines of fatalities due to physiological disease, war, political violence, and interpersonal violence. I am convinced that what we are dealing with is a lack of “normalization” of driver education in this country. (I will speak mostly from a U.S. perspective in this essay.)

For my generation – Gen-Z – driver education is available through public school programs and reasonably priced private driving schools. In some states, like mine in North Carolina, driver education is required. But just because something is required does not mean students will take the step seriously. In fact, they see at as that: a step. Driver education becomes “additive” to the process of growing into adulthood. I think driver education should be “transformative,” not just a box to check, but rather an endeavor to authentically undertake.

The problem of driver deaths is disquieting. I typically turn to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for social-epidemic statistics. According to a 2019 article by the NIH, driving is “one of riskiest things you do every day … more than 36,000 people died in car accidents in the U.S. in 2018. Millions more are injured each year.” We are not talking about isolated instances for one-off deaths. We drive nearly every day. Multiple “us” as individuals times the 255,241,278 adults 18-and-older that the 2020 Census Bureau reported during its last published cycle. (Now add in the “adults” who drive between 16-17 years of age.) That’s a startling number of potential drivers on the streets in the United States every single day!

From alcohol and drug impairment to speeding, there are numerous reasons for driver accidents and resulting deaths. I choose to focus on distracted driving. According to Dr. Bruce Simons-Morton, an expert on teenaged driving, we have become primed for constant distraction due to innovations of technology and, quite simply, digital addiction. He writes, “Because we’re so phone driven, the tendency is when somebody calls us or texts us, we want to respond immediately … to drive safely, we have to overcome that powerful impulse.” Eyes off the road for even one second means a car driven at 55mph has traveled one-quarter of a football field. Five seconds of distraction and we’ve gone end zone to end zone in that time at that speed!

This information is discussed during driver education, but it might not always be internalized by students. I think driver education is important as a transformative tool, and we need to “normalize” driver education through the use of the very technologies that often cause distracted accidents: social media. Print and billboard and digital ads are no longer an effective measure to impart information to Gen-Z. As media scholar Marshall McLuhan once wrote, “the medium is the message.” Following suit, driver education’s importance should be communicated through social media. As we have learned, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Tik Tok have become the alpha-purveyors of information to young people. I envision a social media campaign that hammers home the importance of distracted driving through serious videos of people’s narratives, earnest celebrities espousing the importance of safe driving and attending driving schools, and even parody and song that continues to normalize safe driving. Humor and even social teasing via some shaming (it had to be said!) can also be incorporated. The bottom line is that just as a health procedure is automatically assumed and understood as a remedy to a physiological or biological illness, so too should driver education be normalized as preventative measure to prevent driving deaths, especially via distraction. Everything else in our private, political, public, recreational, and educational lives are socially mediated. So should health, including health epidemics such as driving deaths.

Have I witnessed such distracted driving? Absolutely. I see it mostly among my friends who drive with a windshield out of one eye and a small screen out of the other. I have seen it among my parents who are always trying to read and answer that one work email at a red light that continues into the change of a green. I have often found myself “itching” to pick up my phone when a notification’s beep shatters the air. But, here are some steps I have taken to minimize my own distracted driving. (1) I connect my phone to my car in case I need to answer an emergency call through my hands-free display panel, but (2) I physically put my phone out of reach in the glove compartment. (3) I turn on my “away” text message in case texts come through. (4) I turn my volume and vibration level completely off when driving. (5) I use my car insurance’s digital tracker as a cautionary measure to stay away from my phone. (6) And, I preset a playlist from my phone that I can control through my radio so I’m not tempted to fumble through Spotify or Apple Music.

Oh, one more thing: when I took driver education my teacher sent us a Tik Tok video to watch of a girl who lost her best friend due to distracted driving. It was gruesome in content, but also devastating in terms of human loss and survivor trauma. (She was in the car with her friend when she died.) That social media video made a transformative mark on me and as hard as it is I try to recall that video often.

Here’s the thing: it took a social media video to impact me that much and it took driver education teacher to open my eyes. The latter cannot be understated. Driver education is necessary to ending distracted driving and driving deaths overall. Dr. Ginger Yang, a teen driving expert at Ohio State University wrote in a 2019 report, “conversations about safe driving need to be small topics each time but be brought up multiple times.” Combined with social media presence, I think driver education will save even more lives. Normalizing driver education as an everyday commitment recalled through transformative understandings of community safety is necessary to fulfill “the good life together.”