Name: Ryle Lancaster
From: Virginia Beach, VA
Votes: 0
Lack
of Education Kills
Our
lack of education when we sit behind kills. Our unawareness and
inability to read the roads and demeanor of other drivers kills. Our
unbothered attitudes getting to where we have to go kills. As we
become comfortable with the routine of driving, we tend to lose
perspective of the danger and power held behind operating motor
vehicles and the responsibility of respectfully sharing the roads
with our community.
In
order to reduce the number of fatal accidents when we get behind the
wheel, we should program technology to not just reassure our vehicle
safety and relieve the responsibility of the driver, but we should
also commit to checking in with drivers even after they’ve
qualified for their license. We can mandate breathalyzers and phone
restrictions with technology to assure the ability of the driver to
operate a vehicle safely. Advancing features such as parking cameras,
blind spot indicators, and emergency stopping can be mandated to
support vehicle safety.
The
most significant approach we should take to address driver safety and
consistent evaluation of drivers themselves. Annually, we can require
drivers to retest for their license qualifications in order to update
their knowledge, fine-tune their skills, and this will even give us
the opportunity to take their paperwork and information status into
account for updated recordkeeping. Accidents occur when drivers sink
into the epidemic of complacency and we can take the initiative to
battle this.
Within
the first six months of obtaining my driver’s license, I was
involved in a horrific car-totaling accident. I was turning
left on a solid green light, yielding my turn across lanes of traffic
and in the process of mindlessly turning, a car coming straight-on
collided with me. My car had turned multiple times, completely
demolished along with the 2018 Audi, which went up a telephone pole
across the intersection. I had to jerk my knees from out of the
dashboard and throw my body as the door just to escape the smoky,
leaking vehicle. My faulty awareness and application of driver
education to the situation left a handful of passengers to be cut out
of their compressed car by the jaws of life and urgently rushed off
to the hospital.
Directed
by a court order, I observed nearly 10 hours of traffic court to
empathize the consequences correlated with situational drivers errors
as well as attended a collection of driver improvement and remedial
classes, fostering my skills and diving into road knowledge I had
never learned before actually. Personally, I still use depth
perception exercises and use drivers edal tests every few
months to test my situational knowledge. Most importantly, I didn’t
emphasize practice before my collisions. I avoided highways, avoided
changing lanes, delayed my trips based on traffic- I was a scared
driver. More dangerous than being a complacent driver is being an
unconfident driver. The best thing I can do to be a better driver is
to put myself out there to pick up the norms in the driving culture.
