Ensuring road safety

I feel the best way to improve road safety is to require more of students learning to drive than just the common cut and dry note taking I experienced. I think one of the best ways we can advocate for better road safety is by questioning who exactly is on the road. I know teenagers just finishing drivers ed have to experience driving on the road in real time like everyone else, but there needs to be more practical information being taught in drivers ed, to correct the issue of driving safety at its source. For example, when I took driver’s ed at seventeen, I only had to sit in class for 2-3 hours after school and rewrite anything on the board. We did not talk much about what was on the board, and had quizzes every couple of units to see what all we learned. The rules of these quizzes were simple. If you missed so many questions, you did not pass that quiz, however the scores of all your quizzes were averaged at the end of Drivers’ Ed and if you had a passing score, you went on to take the driving portion of Driver’s Ed. This driving portion of the class would be the first time some of those students were behind the wheel, but from what I heard, everyone in my class passed both the class and the driving portion of drivers ed. That is good news for them, but I often heard of people from my class saying they were still very anxious about being behind the wheel months after we had finished the class. Most of us felt that we were not that prepared to be on the road because we only took notes and quizzes about trivial things, and spent very little time learning how to apply what we learned. For this, I would recommend that there be more emphasis on the not-so-fun parts of driving that first time drivers worry about. The details such as what to do when your tire pops, or if your hood comes flying up while driving, how to enter and exit the highway safely, how to change lanes on the interstate/highway, ways to watch your speed efficiently, what to do if you get in an accident, etc. Information such as this would be helpful to anyone driving but especially new drivers. These are the things that I wish I had learned in driver’s ed because some time after taking the class I was involved in an accident and I knew not even the slightest idea of what to do. This would cause a lot of complications down the line with the other driver and I’s insurance companies because we had collected not even the most basic information on each other such as names of insurance providers. Neither of us did not know to call the police and file a report when it happened or anything. Looking back on it, it may seem like common sense to do those things, but as young as we were, we both had no clue to do these things. Maybe we were not taught because everyone assumes this to be common sense, but again, neither of us knew to do this because I was not taught this in drivers ed. What I was taught in drivers ed was the history of the interstate thought, and how that came to be, or how much mileage some of the most popular brands of cars get. Again, these were trivial things that I may not have ever needed to know. Therefore, I would recommend teaching more practical things to new drivers so that they feel they are more equipped to be on the road with other drivers. I imagine that building that confidence in new drivers would ease their anxiousness and decrease the chances of them making silly mistakes on the road that could have otherwise been avoided.

My second suggestion for improving road safety is developing an app that uses real life situations that new drivers may experience to boost their concept of just how hectic driving could get. This app would not be used to scare them, but it would help them to prepare for the real life situations that can rapidly happen on the streets and highways. There would be situations in the app that would involve emergency braking, the best, and safest plan of action when your tire pops and how to steer out of the way of traffic, how to steer safely when your hood flies up, what to do when you begin to smell smoke or see smoke coming from your car, etc. An educational game like this would help so many drivers, and I do not mean only new drivers either because I feel we all could use a refreshed course on this type of information every now and again. This game would need investors or someone to spend the money to develop this application, of course, but I think it would only do good for the safety of our streets. I have so much faith in this idea that I have been looking for investors for this game and have even started looking into patenting it. With this application, I feel we could greatly decrease the number of fatalities occurring on the road by better training drivers on all aspects of safe driving, even in the face of emergencies.