In the Driver’s Seat: How a Thriving Society Practices Safe Driving

A crying mother, a weeping father, a lonely friend, a remorseful coworker, isolated classmates—all people affected by the tragedies that occur on our roads far too often. According to The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, unintentional death via automobile accidents is the second highest cause of unnatural death. The only phenomenon that tops car accidents in death count is poisoning (e.g. overdosing) on things like pharmaceuticals or opioids. Rates of dying due to car accidents have been increasing over the decades due to high growth in the number of vehicles being used in our cities, distinctly more cars has an outcome of more deaths by car. On the other hand, safety features in automotives and progress in things like road design, driving laws, and driver education have increasingly contributed to safer travel. The American population is growing, which means that cities and roadways are only going to become busier and less safe, that is why it is essential that proper driver education and implementation of said education in the real world is vital to so many people’s survival.

What does driver education entail? Everyone has heard of the basic “Driver’s Ed.” courses often taken by young students at their local high school, however, should this be the only roadway education the average person has in their lifetime? Should one written test as a teenager determine validation for a lifetime of motorway operation? Harvard Health Watch executed a study in which researchers determined how many hours a person will spend driving throughout their lifetime. The numbers concluded that the average American spends 38,000 hours driving from teenage years to the end of life. In essence, less than one-hundred hours of education is expected to suffice for many thousands of hours of real-driving in everyday life. The opposing argument could be made that since most people drive so often, thus practicing it nearly every day, that no additional education is necessary. If further education and safety implication was not needed, deaths by car accident would not be the second highest cause of accidental expiration.

Police officers and law enforcement are in place to pull over and ticket (or arrest if the situation warrants) unsafe drivers. The ratio of the population of drivers to the amount of police officers and cruisers is far too extreme to depend on the police for fixing this societal issue. Drivers must hold themselves accountable with their habits and practices on the road in order to decrease fatal accidents. Learning new habits and changing the way someone drives may be difficult, but despite that, the benefits justify. Midlife driver’s education (MDE) may be the answer to fixing dangerous driving styles, routines, and typical practices. MDE could be developed by local, state, or national governments and consist of a few different qualities. The first quality, and most basic one, is retesting. Generic laws like when it is legal to pass, speed limit signs, and how stoplights work are practiced every day, but there are many laws and situations that show up only once in a long period of time. For example, the lights on school buses signal many things, and they are unique compared to any other government or emergency vehicle. A person who rarely drives in suburban areas or is not often exposed to school buses may not understand what the rules around the yellow buses consist of. If they do not know what flashing yellow lights signal, or what flashing reds lights indicate, the lives of children are put at risk. The driver should have to be tested throughout his life, therefore, coercing him to refresh his brain of all rules of the road, and learning any new developments that may have been put in place over the decades since his initial driving education and testing as a teenager. This is just one example of many, and each person is unique as to what laws they see as common in their lives. Some laws may be seen by one group as simple and common, while others rarely have the need to implement it in their driving. Other qualities of MDE include non-written examinations, where the actual driving is evaluated and tested. Online courses such as videos that describe dangerous driving situations or explain new roadway laws could be required, providing an easily accessible source for improving the knowledge of the streets.

Flaws exist in every proposition, including MDE. There exists the first issue: “adults who fail the driver’s test may have further consequences like not being able to commute to work and losing their job.” Public transportation exists, yet not everyone’s location is near the routes that the buses travel. Another stipulation with MDE is tax-dollar funding. Politicians and law makers would be weary to put forward an idea of such large magnitude. Society and government must ask themselves whether allocating tax dollars is more important that the contagion of unsafe driving.