The Long Drive to Safety

Haochen Huang

The Long Drive to Safety

My friend Justin is one of those hot shot drivers. He’s the kind of person who will hit a turn at 30 miles per hour while the rest of us in the back are smashed to the side. One day, he was thumbing through the GPS navigator while driving on the freeway. I was feeling very nervous because I didn’t think his skill could save us if something bad happened. Sure enough, a truck ahead of us suddenly braked. My friend barely had enough time to slam his brakes.

We only hit the bumper of the truck and there was no real damage. Luckily, no one was hurt. But when I think back on that experience, I consider how things could have been much worse and how easily they could be prevented.

Driving education is important because it teaches the rules of the road and the safe practices drivers should follow. If followed strictly, they will reduce the number of traffic related deaths because they specify how to keep conditions predictable and what to do in certain dangerous situations.

Driving education has not failed us. Rather, the human element has failed to reduce the number of traffic related deaths. The basic rules of the road are perfectly logical and easy to remember. It’s overconfidence or carelessness that mainly results in accidents. Someone didn’t see the pedestrian at the corner or someone thought they could drive at their favorite speed on a rainy day.

I think we should take two major steps to make the road safer for everyone. The first is to have more traffic officers to enforce traffic rules and pullover careless drivers. I remember a statistic that says only 1 in 200 traffic violations are caught by police. So if the rules are enforced more often and consistently, the driving culture will change as more violators are caught and fined. No one likes points on their records and wasting time in court.

The second step is more revolutionary. We should take advantage of better technology to fully automate driving. The error rate of self-driving cars is getting lower and lower as people develop better driving algorithms and AI. Machines never get tired, they don’t have egos, and they can’t be careless. By removing the human element from driving, we can drastically reduce the number of traffic related deaths.

Machines are less than perfect and they can still cause accidents, but I’m sure that machine error rates are much lower than human error rates. In fact, many of the accidents related to self-driving cars were because of the drivers, not the machines [1].

Culturally, we’re still far away from accepting fully automated cars. I believe we should and will get there eventually, but for now I will follow the golden rule: drive as if my mom is sitting in the passenger seat, which means driving at safe speeds and distances, keeping my emotions in check, leaving the cell phone alone, and avoiding driving like Justin.

[1] Reisinger, Don. “Humans—Not Technology—Are the Leading Cause of Self-Driving Car Accidents in California.” https://fortune.com/2018/08/29/self-driving-car-accidents/