The Importance of Safe Driving

The Importance of Safe Driving

I have been driving for three and a half years now so I’m sure you know that I have had many run-ins with bad drivers and also my own experiences in lack of judgment or knowledge while driving the roadways of Texas. In this essay I will provide my opinion on the education that we receive to obtain our drivers license but also what I believe is left out of our education which can lead to accidents as serious as a life being taken, along with my own experience of being in an incident while driving.

I would like to start off with the education that we receive in the year leading up to our 16th birthday. There are a couple forms of drivers education paths that you can choose to obtain your driver’s license. I would like to start off with the in-person classes that you can choose to take that normally come with drive time with a trained instructor. This choice I believe is the best when it comes to preparing you to start driving and I think this is the most beneficial when it comes to knowing all the rules of the road once you get behind the wheel by yourself. Then there is the option of parent taught drivers education with said parent recording drive times. I believe that this can be a beneficial path of driver education. My experiences with my friends doing this I don’t think it is truly regulated enough and is the best way of preparing young drivers to keep our roads safe. When it comes to not just the person learning to drive but everyone else that is going to be on the road with them, I believe that the parents are more than capable of teaching the written and book part of drivers ed. However, it should be a mandatory requirement that new drivers have a set amount of drive time hours with a trained educator in the passenger seat making sure that they can follow not only the rules of the road but also making sure that they have the right judgment so everyone else on the road is safe too. I believe that just this small change would dramatically decrease the incident rate of young or new drivers.

For instance, I was recently involved in a wreck due to a young driver not fully understanding the rules of the road paired with lack of attention while driving. I had just turned onto one of the main roads here in Lubbock and the other driver was stopped at a stop sign waiting to merge onto the same road. They looked up from their phone and assumed I was going to make a turn at said stop sign and began to pull out into my lane. Thankfully there was no traffic in the other lane and I was able to avoid a straight on T-bone collision and just the side of my vehicle hit theirs and nobody was harmed in this incident. Many accidents like this happen daily across Texas, a high percentage with a lot worse outcomes such as death due to distracted driving amongst the younger driving class. I believe a good solution,for not only young distracted drivers but for all drivers in general, would be to disable cellular devices while the car is in motion. The majority of cars on the road today are equipped with built-in GPS systems so I believe there is no reason to use your phone while driving. In an emergency, you can pull off to the side of the road and then use your phone. I believe that if phones were disabled

while a vehicle is in motion we would see a dramatic decline in the amount of accidents causing death and just roadway accidents in general.

Another example of distracted driving that has greatly affected how I drive today is when a very close family friend actually struck another person on the road who was driving a motorcycle. Unfortunately, this incident resulted in the man on the motorcycle losing his life due to a choice that could’ve been easily avoided. A statistic that I found while researching this issue was that almost thirty percent of all accidents that happen on the road not just in Texas but nationwide are due to cell phone usage while operating your vehicle. Ten percent of those accidents end in death of the drivers and or passengers of the drivers that are choosing to make this reckless and careless decision. I believe that both examples and the stats that I provided show that distracted driving needs to be cracked down on harder and made punishable with greater consequences. If this change is made to the punishments of distracted driving and cellphone usage being greater, I believe that drivers would finally be more motivated to make the right decision positively affecting the death ratio and amount of accidents among young drivers as well as all drivers making our roads safer to travel.

In conclusion, there are many steps that you can take to become a better driver today and also steps for soon to be drivers to keep not only yourself safe but also everyone else on the road with you safe. For new drivers make sure that you are getting correct and thorough instruction while learning to drive whether it is from your parents or a driving instructor and make sure that you are getting plenty of real world experience before your test and getting behind the wheel by yourself. For all drivers experienced or learning, make yourself aware of the leading factors causing accidents and deaths in motor vehicles so that we can work together as a community to lower the numbers and not become a number in the statistics.