Safe Drive Stay Alive

In the past 4 years, at least 5 people have died in the area I live in due to driving. To this day, their friends, family and kind strangers leave flowers and letters where they sadly passed away. I regret to say that I’ve become accustomed to seeing them as I walk home. However, these displays of eternal love serve as a reminder to all of us of how grave the consequences can be if drivers do not have the proper education to safely drive on the road. A collision can happen in any second but the pain will last a lifetime.

When I was in Year 12, my school arranged for all of us to attend a one-day safe driving course called Safe Drive Stay Alive which, at the time, was an excuse for us all not to be in school so we were excited. Yet on the coach ride home, we were all reflecting and discussing the different tragedies we’d witnessed on the course and feeling defiant that we would never make the mistakes those drivers made. It’s been a while since we went to that course. Each year, more and more of us have become drivers and I know a small few who, while they luckily still haven’t been in a car accident, have come quite close. Driving after having a few drinks, swerving on the road to the beat of a song for laughs, going past the speed limit to beat your friend to the destination – the list goes on.

To me, I think the reason why many of us forget how strongly we were against reckless driving after we actually become drivers is because there’s nothing left to remind you. In the UK, there’s always ads on public transport about the importance of safe driving which I still think are essential for those learning to drive but when you have your own car, there’s nothing like that. It could be said that increasing the ads about safe driving on radio stations could possibly make a significant improvement but it can be easily argued that the impact wouldn’t be widespread enough as, according to the website HypeBot, 48% of drivers listen to music using their phone connections. Therefore, I would suggest a compulsory safe driving course to be implemented either every year or every 6 months to ensure that safe driving is always in the front of our minds when driving.

For now, though, since that’s not currently in place, I’ll have to remind not only myself but the people around me of the danger they’re putting themselves and others at risk of if they’re not driving safely. If we never confront and address those close to us about driving safely, we’ll always forget the serious impact we can have on other people’s lives and then we’ll never be able to reduce the danger of driving.