Driving and Traffic School Scholarship Essay

Alexandra Howard

I was in a car crash. An ignorant driver rear ended me on my way to a Yearbook Design Meeting with our publishers. I was driving my boyfriend and I in the rain and there was horrible traffic at 8 am. I was annoyed because of it, but I was still on high alert because I knew that if I wasn’t, I could be in danger. All of the cars ahead of me screeched to a stop so I immediately slammed on my brakes to prevent a crash. It worked and I had a second of breath before I felt an immediate crash from behind. Since I had only had my license for four months, I screamed. The driver screamed at me for stopping so fast, even though I had to, because she had a suspended license and knew she was now going to get caught. She also had been just ignorant in driving because she was paying attention elsewhere instead of the cars braking hard in front of her. That moment burned a memory in my brain for the rest of my life but also taught me the importance of safe driving.

Too many people believe that they can’t make an impact with their actions. This is not the case. There are so many different instances that you can make a difference. Driving deaths can be directly lowered by individuals practicing safe driving. Unsafe driving can hurt you, others, and your wallet. Car damage is horribly expensive even with insurance for both recipients in an accident, but losing any life can be the worst type of damage. We want a safer society where we don’t have to worry about your loved ones dying in a car crash. We also want to encourage technology and want the creators of our cars to make them safer and safer as we go along. One of the best ways to encourage this is building the values into how we teach people to drive.

First, we look at what we currently do to make driving safe and critique it. We start at the law. The laws that keep people from texting while driving, drinking while driving, speeding, etc make sense. The punishments for doing the crimes can have more of an impact by them having to take intense classes and relearning the ropes of driving. This will burn into people’s brains how important driving safely is. We also can look at education in public schools. In there, they should use students from their school (real life examples) to explain either a horror story they’ve had while driving to scare students or just why driving safely is important. The schools can also invite speakers to talk about the importance as well.

Then we look at what we aren’t doing. There are “driving schools” that test drivers for their license, but these schools should provide actual lessons for students (these do exist but they’re very expensive so they should be government funded and affordable/free for everyone) in order to teach students who don’t have their parents around often to teach them. There can also be introductory and free/affordable lessons for older individuals who don’t have their licenses. This can prevent them from stealing cars, driving illegally, driving without an education, and doing dangerous actions to avoid getting caught. These lessons can be through the DMV and they help teach individuals how to drive safely.

It is also important for us individuals to look at our bad habits while driving and address them. I know for myself that I should stop all the way at stop signs no matter if I can see everything or not. Unexpected occurrences can always happen and I have been working on improving myself on it. I also should slow down when driving in a hurry. I get panicked and just drive faster which can harm myself and others, which I don’t want to do. Those two habits I will fix and get rid of, replacing them with positive new habits.

In conclusion, there are so many great ways to improve driving safety and prevent deaths. We can work as individuals and a community to help save the lives of everyone, even animals. I hope that car companies understand our requests; we can always protest, make movements, make petitions, etc to encourage those companies to make our cars safer and safer. They also have incentives because then people will want to buy their cars more. I hope to improve our society as a whole through these ideas.