It Takes a Village to Save Our Drivers

According to the CDC, every 50 minutes, at least one car crash happens. The problem of the number of deaths related to driving is dramatically increasing. Compared to the major wars, there is a dramatic difference between the number of soldiers who have died in combat and the number of people who have died in a car crash. This is a big problem in the United States with car safety. Most people do not take it seriously and it is showing in our numbers. Did you know that the age group of 16-17 get in the most accidents involving injuries but drivers ages 80 and older have the highest driver death rates? Teenagers do get distracted by their phones, but they are not the ones causing all the crashes involving deaths.

I have been in 2 accidents in my life. Once, when I was very little, there was a traffic jam while my mom was taking me back from the doctor. We were stuck in the traffic jam for about 2 hours at that point. There was this car behind us who was very upset with the traffic and kept honking at us. The person driving the car must have been over waiting with everyone else, so they decided to push the gas and try to move through the cars and move to the side of the road to drive past us all. But instead of moving through the cars, they drove right into the back of our car, hitting us. Thankfully, my mom and I were okay, but our car had a huge dent in the back.

The second time was last summer. My dad took his girlfriend, my sister, her friend, and myself on a beach trip. Everything was going perfectly, and we were about 30 minutes away from our resort. We were all getting excited, and my sister and her friend decided to take off their seatbelts so they could lay in the back row of the van. We were driving through one of the little towns we had to go through to get to the beach. As we pulled up to a stoplight, I took off my seatbelt so I could grab a bottle of water in the back. But as soon as I started to get up, a truck crashed into us. The driver wasn’t paying attention and was texting on his phone instead of looking. My sister, her friend, and I got thrown towards the front and I ended up with a concussion. I was so scared to even get back into the car. This experience really showed me how seriously I must take the driving and automobile laws.

There are a few steps that I can take to be a better and safer driver. For example, I can always make sure to have my phone on silent and have it face down on the passenger seat. Another thing I can do to be a safer driver is to not blast music while driving. Kids my age love to roll down the windows and play music loudly while driving, which can be a big distraction. Playing music that loud can cause multiple things to happen including hearing problems, the music being too distracting to pay attention to the road, crashes, etc. A big step that we can take is to require all high school students to take a drivers ed test. Some states require it but there are still multiple states in the United States that don’t. It would help our future drivers be able to learn all the rules of driving in a safe environment before they take their drivers’ test. Also, we should increase the enforcement of the punishment of texting and driving. Texting and driving are a huge problem and are one of the number one causes of accidents and crashes. I feel that there should be a requirement where if someone is over the age of 60, every year they should need to be checked for eyesight, hearing, etc, to prove that they can still drive and will not cause accidents due to not being able to see or hear correctly. We should not put everyone else at risk for something that we can fix very easily.

The United States has a big problem with driver safety, and we need to fix it. There is so much that we can do to improve our country’s driver safety. So, why not fix it? The United States is so advanced than we were 50+ years ago, we should be much safer than we were better. We have new cars being made constantly with new technology and safety measures. We should not have the numbers that we have today. If law enforcement and the community work together, we can fix these problems and make our communities safer.