Driving Comes with a Catch – Are you up for it?

As
a driver, it is our responsibility to ensure the safety of ourselves
and those around us. It truly is a privilege to have the ability to
travel anywhere at exponentially faster rates than in the past.
However, it comes with a catch. With the adaptation of motor
vehicles, deaths due to reckless driving seem like a norm. In
reality, it doesn’t have to be this way. Through drivers ed
magnified with real-life events, such a high fatality rate can be
prevented.

Making
sure that such education is available makes it so that some of the
concepts one may consider common sense can be spread to the public.
For example: You are sitting in a classroom, and someone is going
over a topic you already have knowledge of. You roll your eyes and
wonder why in the world they are doing this. To you, it seems like
common sense. But, there is always someone in that room who is
writing down notes and listening intently. The same goes for the
lessons taught in a drivers ed setting. Despite seeing many
basic safety rules and traffic laws in personal experience, there is
still a benefit to making it universally known. There will always be
a person who either did not know of a certain concept, or they don’t
understand the reasoning behind a certain topic. Without ensuring
everyone is educated on both the how and why for traffic laws, that
death toll will remain high.

Personally,
I have experienced the sincere mistake of not knowing how a certain
part of driving operated. I remember getting a call from a close
friend. He was sobbing, almost inconsolable. He had just been in a
car accident, where the motorist hadn’t slowed his driving in bad
weather conditions on a winding backroad, leading to their car
flipping into a ditch. The car was totaled, the driver had broken
their back, and everyone had nasty concussions, but they all
recovered. However, this was a lesson to the driver that he
overlooked – speed should always be reduced in conditions that are
not ideal, and that the speed limit is the maximum speed in ideal
conditions only. Had he known or understood the importance of the
speed limit not being the recommended speed at all times, this
could’ve been prevented.

For
my personal safety on the road, I use a lot of experiences I have
heard on the news or from friends who have been in accidents to
enhance what I have learned in drivers ed, making that traffic
rules sentient in my head whenever my hands grasp the steering wheel.
By having both an education of the rules of motor vehicle operation
and the experiences to back it up, I remember what must be done to
keep myself and others safe. To not become a statistic in the dangers
of driving, I personally take driving to be a very serious act.
Driving comes with a catch. Are you up for it?