Driving’s Real Danger

Distracted Driving is not the issue. Texting while driving is an issue, it is a serious detriment to vehicular safety, and people still do it despite knowing full well that they shouldn’t. That being said, if we as a society are to focus on a betterment in driving education, we should not focus on telling people what they know they shouldn’t do. It’s the same as America’s campaigns against cigarettes. People know that it’s harmful to themselves and others to smoke, but they still do it. There’s a limit to who the information will reach and I believe that texting while driving has reached its upper limit.

In actuality, America should be focused on informing drivers about what they’re doing wrong. I’ve referred to this category as, “gross negligence.” This category consists of two major causes of traffic related fatalities and accidents: speeding and driving under the influence. People know the legal implications of being caught, but justify the actions due to cultural acceptance.

Young drivers – especially between the ages of 16 to around 30 years of age – have found an acceptance or adoration in the practice of driving under the influence. This can be seen simply by people driving home after being intoxicated at a party. When someone drives home under the influence, two scenarios happen.

The first scenario, the person decides they want to go home from the party and they don’t have a driver. Instead of calling a driver, they decide that they feel comfortable enough to drive home despite clear levels of tipsiness and mental judgment fatigue. Then, no one stops them from entering their car, whether it’s due to a friend’s lack of care or support for the culturally accepted action. They start their engine, head towards their house, speed far over the speed limit due to negligence or enjoyment, and in a haze of impairment they blow a stop sign and rear end into another driver stopped.

Good samaritans at the scene said that they could hear Tina Tintor breathing. They talked about how small the fire was, that they were sure they could grasp the young girl before the flames spread. The inflated airbags blocked the crushed door, but you could see her inside the car. Impact likely shattered most of her upper body’s integral bones due to collision with the airbags. The thought of seeing the luster fade from her eyes. Having to watch someone die in front of you. Seeing the color fade from her skin. If she could physically cry, she probably would have. She sat in her grave waiting to meet her end, her entire body paralyzed.

I wonder what her last words were. I wonder what her dreams were. I wonder where she was going or where she came from. I wonder about the places she would’ve gone to. I wonder about the person she would’ve married. I wonder about the kids who were never born. I wonder how old the dog in the passenger seat was. I wonder what her life meant to her. I wonder how people can justify millionaire Henry Ruggs’ actions and commit them all the same. Henry Ruggs’ blood alcohol content would be double the legal amount to drive and his speed would be far above the speed limit. But to be honest, who Henry Ruggs is doesn’t matter, the fact that people commit the same atrocities he did and feel okay with doing so – to glorify doing so.

There’s two court systems in America. There’s the legal court system and there’s the court of public opinion. Most people would agree that Henry Ruggs’ actions were disgusting and imprudent; however, there are a wave of people who believe that what Ruggs’ did that day was okay and acceptable. A wave of support for various reasons would come out through social media. Obviously the majority believed that Ruggs’ deserved every year in person he received, but at an international scale, even 2% of people on Ruggs’ side would be tens of thousands supporting the actions of a drunk driver. A primary reason included that he didn’t know that what he did would end someone’s life. Traffic related deaths wouldn’t be an issue if people knew that what they were doing would end someone’s life.

People just like Ruggs follow the same line of misconstrued actions. They drive their car to a location where they know that they’ll become intoxicated. They decline friend’s requests to not leave alone. They don’t call an Uber or a taxi and they get behind the wheel because they are overconfident, they believe it’s fun, or they’re misinformed by cultural norms. Again, the majority of people absolutely understand that drunk driving is not okay; however, there’s a portion of young drivers who don’t believe that drunk driving is harmful and that it is actually fun to do so. This is the separation between driving under the influence and distracted driving. This is where we as a society need to educate others on. When someone texts while driving, it’s in the moment, they know it’s wrong, but they attempt to find a spot where they themselves would be safe to do the harmful action. When someone drives under the influence, it’s a premeditated action, it lasts for the entirety of the car ride, the driver is being completely negligent, the driver assumes their action is either safe or fun, and the driver does not care for the wellbeing of others. There’s a group of people who simply don’t care to understand the harms of drunk driving, but they’re the people who need to be educated the most.

Moving onwards to the number one cause of traffic related deaths in America, speeding. Just like driving under the influence, there’s a positive stigma towards speeding; but in this case, speeding is far more widespread and accepted. There is not a credible research paper or survey done that doesn’t tell you that Americans speed. Whether someone is young, old, male, female, asian, white, black, hispanic, latino, two eyes, one-leg, or anything in between, they speed and think it’s okay. It’s simply insane that the number one cause of death is one the road is one of the most widely accepted practices. People will speed with nowhere to go, with ten people on the road, or a hundred people in front of them.

I understand that if everyone’s committing a violation together, it becomes the new norm. In most cases, the action becomes acceptable and society shifts to fit the new notion of what’s okay to do. I don’t understand how we as empathetic humans can allow this change to occur.

In twenty years, I don’t want to come home from a long day of work and notice my spouse isn’t home. I look down to check my phone and notice countless missed phone calls and text messages questioning where I am. I call my wife and she’s screaming through tears about my daughter. My little girl in the emergency room. A man driving just 15 miles per hour over the speed limit shifting lanes and sideswiping my child into critical condition. How am I or anybody expected to keep their kid safe in a world that’s so okay with actions that cause detrimental harm to others. I can give my kid all my love and teach them everything they need to reach their goals. Just for it all to be taken away in an instant by someone speeding. And it doesn’t have to be my child, it could be my spouse, my cousin, my father, my uncles, my aunts, or me. And there’s really nothing I could retroactively do about it to save them.

It’s time for America to be proactive on an issue. We can’t save the ones we love who have passed from tragedies, but we can save those who haven’t. It’s time to show sympathy for others and practice better driver education. No one needs to speed ten miles per hour over the speed limit, what people need to do is advocate for enforcement of the traffic code. No one needs to drive home intoxicated, what people need to do is take better precautionary measures to drunk driving: when planning to go out to a party, carpool in an Uber and leave the car at home, when noticing someone is leaving a party, make sure they don’t attempt to drive by themselves despite their protests, and most importantly, when someone is glorifying how cool driving under the influence makes them, tell them that they’re being a terribly person who’s justifying the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent lives annually.

In the year 2022, almost 150 years since cars were invented, it’s time to start finally taking steps towards safety driving habits. We need to stop thinking about how we can retroactively stop problems, but rather how we can put our best foot forward and stop issues before they happen. All the fancy safety car equipment in the world isn’t going to stop a speeding seven-ton truck. Instead of funerals we need to fight for a change in cultural norms around the practice of gross and negligent driving actions. Tell representatives to advocate for better enforcement around speed limits, tell friends that drinking while driving is not okay, and tell your family that you love them. Until we can educate each other on better driving practices, nobody is safe doing something as simple as going to work. It’s time to stop the real dangers of driving.