Drivers Ed Essay Contest – 2022

I believe that the importance of driver education is greatly needed. The act of driving a car is both dangerous and requires a tremendous amount of responsibility and risk awareness. It causes more deaths a year than most wars took in the form of US combat deaths from the entirety of the war. In the form of being educated even at the most basic level to avoid even just small accidents could in the future could save a life. The first thing they teach you as a kid just riding in a car is to always wear your seatbelt. However, it is so easily disregarded as you get older. A girl a couple grades older than me lost her life because she got into a car accident and wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, and an insurmountable amount of people have been saved, including some of my family members, because they did. If we can so easily disregard just putting on a seat what happens when it gets to important things like not having the car on when putting in gas, looking at the roads or waiting a couple seconds before going at a newly turned green light, or any other of the minor life saving acts that we are taught to do during drivers ed that are forgotten as soon as your done. I think we could have a more comprehensive driver’s ed for in-car lessons. The online lessons are important but they don’t teach you what those things mean when you’re behind the wheel. When you are sixteen and getting behind the wheel of the car all that is going through your brain is the newfound independence you are about to have and the exciting trips you are going to go on or if you are anything like me, finally getting the taste of independence that everyone else experienced before you. Having driver’s ed teachers that are more than old high school teachers or former retirees that got bored of being in house. On my driver’s lessons I was barely taught how to drive and my family suffered a pay cut so my little sister who just got her license went to a more affordable driver’s education institution, half the time she just went to an ice cream place and got resounding compliments but was not ever taught defensive driving or how to parallel park, which admittedly is not used all that much where I live, but is on the beach closest to our city. I understand this is not something that I am sure the government local or federal care much about nor put much thought into but the fact that more deaths are happening on the road than in some wars, as well as this information not being well known, shows that there is an issue to be discussed or plans to have plans put in place. Honestly, I am looking for any sign of improvement rather than a practice sheet that most people forge anyways. I thankfully have not had to sit with my parents or a friend that had gotten into a car accident of any sort that I have memory of. However, I recently got into a car accident attempting to turn left. Where I live, when you make a left turn there are dotted lines at almost every turn to guide you on where your car is meant to be in response to lanes because a lot of our main left turns have two lanes turning left. Whenever I went down to the beach about an hour and a half from where I live I wanted to go look at bookstores, but it was an unprotected left turn, something I was never taught about, and did not have guidelines on the road of where my car was meant to be that I in the past had relied heavily on. Therefore, when I went to take my left turn my instinct was to stay as close to my curb as possible so that I could be out of the way of the people that had the right of way. That was the wrong way to turn because the man that was trying to go straight was then right next to my car trying to make a U-turn. I went straight. He went straight. I crashed into him wrecking my front bumper and headlights so badly that it bent the frame and I was no longer able to open the passenger side door. If I had ever been taught how to do this correctly in driver’s education I would have been able to go to the bookstores, save myself five-hundred dollars, and most importantly not potentially endanger someone’s livelihood.