Dangerous Driving Affects us All

Driving, in and of itself, is a dangerous thing to do. Revolving around placing yourself in control of an object going orders of times faster than the human body could ever hope to attain is difficult enough but once you add others knowing how unpredictable they can become; it magnifies this danger a great deal. There is absolutely no way to account for another person on the road and no way to guarantee they will follow the laws or act intelligently so each and every one of us on the road has a responsibility to ourselves and others to make sure we are of the best condition to be on the road. Many do not follow this idea and decide to drive irresponsibly. They drive drunk, or high, or exhausted after staying awake for days straight on a bet with their friends. Maybe they speed, pull off tricks going down a city street, or just plain overdrive their headlights. All these things, while many of us might not see a problem, severely limit each driver’s ability to judge the world around them and could lead to a tragic and completely avoidable loss of property, limb, or life.

It is extremely important to attempt to control as many of these dangerous factors in relation to driving as we can. One way to better keep the cities safe is to implement a short, albeit necessary, test of knowledge for each driver when renewing a license. As it stands today many people will never be testing on the rules of the road following their passing of a test and will not pursue any new knowledge on how the roads work after their driver’s exam. This leads to many not understanding new implementations to the driving system that could be put into place afterwards. One example of this is with the recent uptick in roundabout intersections in use around the Twin Cities area. Many older residents are frequently seen unable to use these intersections as they were not in use during their driver’s test and so they were never taught the correct way to use them.

In my life to date I have seen a few examples of people I know doing something reckless or irresponsible. Years ago, as a passenger in the car, I was in an accident due to the driver refusing to settle for coming in behind someone while taking the carpool lane on an entrance ramp. She did have the right-of-way to go in front of the person as they had also sped up to try to beat us there but it could have been completely avoided and saved everyone the hassle of an accident if one person had given in and not pursued an aggressive course. Personally, I can attempt to be a positive example for other drivers on the road and not set precedent for others to break laws. By not driving dangerously myself, I refuse to give someone a reason to driver dangerously in return.