The most dangerous people in the driver seat are teenagers.
Photo by Sam Kutz
Of people between the ages of 15 and 20, car crashes are the leading cause of death. Billions of dollars are spent and people’s lives are forever changed. These things don’t just happen. The numbers and statistics don’t sound quite real. More teenagers die due to car crashes than anything else.
Inside an automobile, several miniature explosions happen within the blink of an eye. These explosions cause a rod to spin, moving a large disk that rotates a succession of gears. Those gears transfer motion to the wheels, propelling the car. This happens with little input from the driver and none from the passengers. To make all this happen, an internal combustion engine needs air, fuel, electricity, and an operator. The wild card is fuel. The tank in every car holds several gallons of flammable gasoline that can make a collision into a fire hazard. All of the mechanical aspects of a car are controllable, but the person driving is the biggest variable.
The riskiest part of any car lies behind the wheel. Turning music all the way up, driving faster than the posted speed limit, and having a habit of grooving to a favorite song make any driver more at risk to get in a collision. 37% of male drivers between 15 and 20 years old involved in fatal crashes were speeding at the time. More than half of the 3,678 passengers between 16 and 20 years killed in a crash weren’t buckled up.
The previous generation of drivers lacked something that this generation has: video games. These simulations may be used to tell stories or allow players to release some stress, but they instill a lack of realism; a world without consequences, where players can start from a point where their characters are faced with a challenge and are allowed to fail and restart from a save point infinitely, until they get it right. When it comes to real life, people don’t get a second chance to drive home knowing that around the same corner there is the same car that will always pull out of the same parking spot without looking. They can’t start from a checkpoint before they were on that road and try again. This new hobby allows the players to retrace past mistakes and even start fresh, losing their high score, but getting a chance to do it perfectly with the strategy guide sitting in their lap. Life doesn’t have a guide to it. People don’t have the luxury of a second chance exactly like the first one. Once something is altered in real life, there is no way to revert it to its original state. Whether it’s the bent frame of a car or a bad first impression, it is impossible to return to the original circumstances. The older generation of drivers on the road knows this. When they were teenagers, these miniature alternate realities didn’t exist.
The other main factor in this is that teenagers think that they’re invincible. Why else would any sane person do half of the dangerous things teenagers do? This is a time in the lives of youth when minor mistakes can be overlooked and forgiven. This coupled with a loose grasp on reality that always allows for a second, third or fourth chance, provides teenagers with reckless driving instincts that cause the death of thousands of people every year. Crashes that involved 15-17 year olds cost more than $34 billion dollars in this nation, which was spent on property damage, medical treatment, and many other related costs. That’s more than Google is worth.
There are campaigns whose purpose is to enforce safe driving, but the best way to change the way people drive is for drivers to take the initiative. Making sure that everyone in the vehicle is buckled up is one of the safest things to do. Some EMTs say they have never had to cut a dead man out of a seat belt.
The easiest way to prevent many deaths that are caused by car crashes is to buckle up. Individual drivers know how they are going to drive, but other drivers can behave unpredictably.
Ultimately, control lies in the hands of the driver. They need to know what is happening on the road is more important than an epic guitar solo or an awesome lyric. Buckling seat belts can save lives in a car wreck, but having an observant driver prevents accidents.
