Name: Keyana Joi Webb
From: Atlanta, Georgia
Votes: 0
Keyana
Webb
March
18th,
2019
Dangers
of Driving
It’s
finally spring break! You’re driving on the highway with your very
best friends, while your favorite song blast through the car
speakers. You guys are going to the beach to hang out with some of
your cousins and family, who live in California, and you’re keeping
in contact all the way there. With them not knowing whether your
stopping somewhere for a pit-stop or driving, they see that you’re
continually texting back, so they pay no mind to the situation at
hand. Exiting the freeway, to finally make it to the house of one of
your family members house, you turn right and pull out your phone
approaching the, now green, stoplight. Hurrying to send a quick text,
you fail to see the car turn out in front of you while going full
speed, then boom… you wake up to find yourself in the hospital room
with IV’s connected to you, a tube down your throat unable to talk.
Distinctly, you remember seeing your family around your bed, and
hearing a mother cry out down the hallway that her son didn’t
deserve to be killed like this, by a girl who could careless to put
her phone down. The only thing you feel now is guilt, that you know
for certain will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Texting
and driving is an issue that has grown tremendously in our world
today, with smartphones being such an available tool in our society.
We have laws that prohibit texting and driving, or physically being
on your phone at all while driving, but what has it really stopped?
Thousands of people are being killed every year due to texting a
driving alone, and a lot of those numbers come from our teens. Not
only is it the fact texting and driving, but distracted driving in
general. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, in 2015,
58% of teen crashes came from driving distractions, this also brings
forth the statistic from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety
(IIHS), that the crash rate for teens is 3 time higher than people 20
years of age or older. With teens being very young, not as
experienced, and already being very hooked to their phones, these
statistics are pretty self-explanatory.
For
the resolving of this issue, there isn’t really any solution that
we can give. As all other laws are broken, this one will continue to
be broken also, especially with the rise of smartphones. As parents
are teaching their children to drive, it is important to make sure
they are very aware while driving, not only to what they’re doing
but to drivers around them. My father always told me, “You have to
drive for other people, while driving yourself.” I can say that I
leave my phone alone while driving because I imagine what would it be
like if I killed my own loved ones, or how it would feel to someone
else if their loved ones were killed. I don’t want to endanger the
lives of anyone else, especially my own, due to the dangers of
driving.
