Just Another Day. Just Another Drive.

It is just another day driving to school when suddenly… CRASH. The air bags inflate. Your head hurts. You look over and see your mom unconscious with blood dripping down her face. Your little brother is in the back seat crying. You hear sirens. Then you realize that your car was just hit by a driver that was not paying attention.

Every year there are thousands of car crashes around the United States that result in deaths. Therefore, drivers need to be educated in road safety because driver education will help them to understand the rules of the road and how following them will cause fewer crashes. Without driver education, new drivers will not know how running red lights and carelessly speeding can be detrimental to their safety as well as others. With driver education courses, students learn how their actions can result in car crashes killing them as well as others, and how to reduce the risk of these crashes by following the rules of the road.

While driver education courses help students understand the risks that they are taking if they are being a careless driver, they also need to act on this knowledge. It is not just enough to have the head knowledge everyone on the road needs to obey the rules to reduce the number of deaths. If a person were to irresponsibly speed down the road and proceed to kill another person. Even if they knew that speeding is illegal and they need to follow the speed limit, they still were not acting on that knowledge. Therefore, while driver education courses are important so that students understand the rules, everyone needs to remember and respond to the rules of the road.

A personal example of irresponsibility on the road is when I was one year old my family was driving, and my dad changed lanes right before a stop light the had changed red. He stopped at the light and the driver behind us was not paying attention to the fact that my dad changed lanes and therefore rear ended us. There were no serious injuries from the crash, but drivers on the road need to pay attention to changes on the road. The rules of the road and driver education courses help prepare new drivers for driving, but once they are behind the wheel of a vehicle, they need to constantly be paying attention while following the rules.

I have seen my family and friends not paying attention while driving. One way that I have seen this has been with phones. I have seen my parents be distracted by their phones well driving, as well as one of my friends. Although this distraction has not caused an accident to me personally, phones are a leading cause of car crashes. People do not realize that phones are a distraction that can cause their eyes to veer from the road for a long period of time. Since the roads are changing all the time, in as little as ten seconds of looking away from the road a person can begin to drift into another lane or a light could turn red and they can hit the person in front of them.

Being off of phones is one of the steps that I can take to become safer on the road as well as paying attention to changes from other cars and surrounding and following all of the rules. I can help make the roads a safer place by ensuring that my family and friends are also off of their devices, following the rules, and watching for changes. I can point out when they are not doing one of these things to help them be aware that their full attention is not on the road and the other cars. I can also tell them to help this cause by spreading the word to their friends and having them tell other friends so that soon everyone is off their phones and following the rules of the road. Drivers education course help this endeavor for safer roads by teaching all of this to students, but as those students get older they forget that they still need to do their part in making the roads a safer place.

In conclusion, everyone needs to do their part to make the roads a safer place by remembering what they were taught in drivers’ education. People need to remember to follow the rules, to pay attention, and to stay off of their phones. I can help by doing these things myself and also by holding others accountable to this and telling them to also let people know when they are being unsafe.