What if you could save a life?

Imagine being a parent, a sibling of a person, that person being someone you love dearly. Now imagine sitting on the couch on the weekend, watching TV, and relaxing when your phone begins to light up, a call from a number you don’t recognize. You answer the phone for this voice to deliver the news no person ever wants to hear-–that person you love so dearly has been involved in a car accident. You later learn, to no surprise, the driver that caused the wreck was under the influence.

Driver education is more than crucial to educating drivers, especially young drivers, to reduce the number of automotive deaths. Since driver’s ed has been offered, there is a correlation of about 4% fewer deaths and 40% fewer convictions. If every state required driver’s ed before any person could get their license, imagine how that number could drastically decrease. Being even a little educated about driving could potentially save millions of lives, and millions more phone calls to families that have to deal with the devastating consequences of the poor and uninformed choices people make.

The steps that can be taken to effectively reduce the number of accidents and resulting deaths are to require a driving class once a year, or even once every 2 years. Most people can slide by getting their licenses with minimal effort because of the lack of requirements, or the laid-back attitude of rural areas across the country. While you can’t fix the attitude of the way people approach driving most of the time, you can always require a class that contains recaps of what you should already know, or provide outside information. By this, I mean going through a simulation, video, or simple pictures to people in rural areas depicting the controlled chaos of a city-like area. Vice versa, show the more populated areas simple road rules and common courtesies (such as what to do when faced with farm equipment down a small road).

I have been fortunate enough in my life to not know anyone personally to me that has been involved in a serious car accident. Though I have come pretty close myself. One night after work, a friend was driving me home. It was about 10 p.m. so it was well past dark on small country backroads that are infested with deer (especially because this was during harvest season). My friend, Marc, didn’t know these roads at all. So it is beyond me why he pulled out his phone and began texting with a combination of all these factors. Before I could even say anything to him about it, we had already ended up in a ditch. Thankfully, both of us were fine, just a bit shook up. A lot of people, like Marc, believed that they were the exception. I firmly believe that this is why people continue to engage in irresponsible driving behavior that causes so many deaths every year. No one is an exception to any driving situation. Anything can always happen at any time.

Personally, I can take a few steps to be a better driver. I know I just talked about being a responsible driver, but I’m not a perfect person in any form. Regrettably, I usually end up reaching high speeds that I really don’t need to be. Most of the time I don’t realize how fast I’m going until I need to slow down, so something I need to work on more than anything is awareness. I’m always focused on what is going on around me and so focused on the road that I forgot to look down at my speed or realize that I’m pushing that gas pedal down just enough to not realize what speed I am hitting. Something else I can do is to practice driving with my parents when I can. As an incoming freshman at a college in the city, I can get all the practice I can get in more populated areas. Not only this, but I could always sign up for more driver ed classes. The more knowledge I have about driving responsibly the better.

To put it bluntly, without driver’s education, the state of the county on the roads would be a lot worse than it already is today. If we can get more people involved in driver’s education, it could end up reducing the number of deaths caused by vehicles tenfold. Knowledge is power, but you need to take care of your life and others to seize that power. Drive safely, and responsibly, and always keep others in mind.