The importance of DriversEd and the Fight against distracting driving.

“Bing!” I look down to check my phone as a new message has appeared. I open up my phone, it will only take a second. I start to read the message that states “hey how- SMASH” I look up my airbag in my face and my car crushed into the end of another vehicle. Then I wake up with a gasp leaving my mouth and sweat down my forehead. I barely can open my eyes to look at the time, 2:00 am my phone reads. An ongoing nightmare for me, is 1 out of 4 United States citizens’ reality. Yes, 1 out of 4 accidents in the US is caused by texting and driving. This is why we need to educate all drivers the dangers of distracted driving and enroll people into Drivers Education programs.

Your car travels 88 feet per second, so let’s say you look down for just 5 seconds that’s 440 feet and translated into yards it is 144.6 yards that’s over a football field’s length that you traveled in 5 seconds not maintaining eye sight with the road. Now I’ve presented two hypotheticals for you but how about yet ANOTHER statistic, Texting while driving is 6x more likely to cause an accident than drunk driving. Let me give you a couple more facts: 3,000 people die and nearly 390,000 injuries are caused by distracted driving. I just did a quick google search to find this information. This information needs to become public knowledge because only some of it I knew based on my own fears and some I knew based on being educated by other outside sources. Most people don’t realize the hurt of a cause until the factual information is presented to them.

All of this information is free to the public yet we haven’t fixed the problem or even attempted to. We need to make people more aware and educate as many people as possible. We need to spread the word to help not only ourselves but the people we care about. It’s hard not getting distracted by the outside wonders of the world but we need to create a system or a method to alleviate the death and injuries. We should always educate new drivers during their permit test, we should be requiring drivers who have to renew their license to re-educate themselves. We should actually require all drivers to watch Public Service Announcements to understand and hopefully change a couple of hearts and minds. We should develop programs to send representatives to every school in America to remind young minds of these dangers. Unless students have been directly impacted by distracted driving like myself they don’t care to look it up. Until my life was altered this problem never even occurred to me. Another more hands on way of prevention is turning your phone on ‘do not disturb’ before starting your vehicle. This will silence all notifications to stop from buzzing or appearing on your screen. Sometimes you can forget to do that so there’s also a way to set your phone to “Drive Do not disturb” requiring you to not see your texts and reply automatically saying that you are driving and will get back to that person, until your car is no longer in motion. To set it to that, Go to settings then Focus, and select Drive. You can also even select under ‘Allow Notifications’ select ‘People’ to allow yourself to only receive messages from certain people while driving. We have all these options just in our Iphone that most aren’t even aware about. By adding this information into citizens’ understanding we can get ahead of some of these car accidents before they turn into life-altering events.

Let’s start from the source, the biggest distraction. An Idea I believe should be required for manning any vehicle should be a required notification block for all cellular devices. It’s amazing Iphone users get the option to turn them off but I think all phones used by drivers in our country should immediately have a driving mode limiting social media, text messages, emails, and other distracting applications. If the citizens of the United States can’t take it upon themselves to not be distracted then we should reduce distractions while manning a vehicle through all cellular devices. Not having your phone light up with notifications is taking away the main source of the distraction. The amount of times I am on the road and someone swerves into my lane and I pass them moments later and say “Oh of course they are on their phone.” That occurrence happens once a day and those people are endangering not only my life but their own. No text message you have to reply to is worth being dead or killing someone else.

All it takes is a couple people to put their phone down and that’s one less death caused or one more injury prevented. We as a country need help, we are bleeding and hurting because distracted driving deaths have plagued too many families and tainted way too many lives. One day your favorite person, client, relative, coworker, teacher, or classmate is here and the next they aren’t, because someone else couldn’t put their phone down. I will forever mourn my friend whose life was taken by a distracted driver. In a perfect world this wouldn’t happen, but we don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in a world where we have free will and the right to choose so choose to put down our phones to save a life. This person choosing to run that light because they were too distracted to look up took everything from her. She had dreams, life goals, aspirations, and people who loved her. Now I have nightmares because I do not want to be the next victim, headline or statistic and I severely hope you aren’t the next person either.

I understand that distracted driving isn’t the main focus of Drivers Education courses and we as a country need to be refreshed on the road rules to ensure the safest driving environment. Sometimes it’s a lack of care but some is a lack of knowledge that people need to learn. I learned through personal driving schools the road rules, full stop at stop signs, blinker usages, different sign meanings to ensure safety, and how to be a defensive driver. I can proudly say I am a good defensive driver due to my drivers education courses and I am thankful because I am still alive whereas reckless drivers have hurt others or themselves. These multiple examples of hurt and death is why we must push Drivers Education and combat distracting driving.