Once upon a time all teenagers entering the tenth grade would take a course known as driver education. Teens all over America drooled over this class, passing meant and easy ticket to freedom, the ability to get a drivers licence. Students today still get their drivers permits before they are eighteen, but the cost of not teaching them in school has become a burden that society has to pay over and over again.
In my tenth grade I could not wait for drivers ed, it meant freedom from bugging my parents and brothers, and sister for a ride. Actually it was always a no from my oldest brother and sister, but sometimes my parents would oblige. I would have paid any price to get my drivers licence, even if it meant kissing the butts of the football coaches. See the coaches always taught drivers education classes, I guess they always got the gravy teaching assignments. The coaches were also extremely sexist, they expected the boys to know how to drive before they got to their first class, but were going spend plenty of time teaching the pretty girls in class to do the same.
Drivers Ed class allowed me to practice driving on a computer screen and then go out in groups of 3 and practice for real. Sitting day after day in front of a simulator learning how powerful a machine it is.
Understanding that I had to treat a car with respect an attention to detail while driving, just as I had with only one other thing in my life up to that point, the television. We learned acronyms like IPDE: Identify, Predict, Decide, and Execute. I still use this every day on the roads in the Baltimore/Washington Corridor. If you are travelling 295 southbound and you are trying to exit on 495 towards Springfield and you are darting between traffic coming and going from MD 193, and dealing with the entrance to 495 towards Silver Spring, then you undoubtedly are using IPDE every day also.
Cars are built safer now on the inside then they ever were ever on the outside. Any accident now has a good chance of the driver living except a head on crash. We have side air bags, front airbags, seats on the frame so tight they can withstand major impacts. Still no matter what is done, if you hit anything head on, a pole, tree, car, the chances are high and always be high the driver will die in the crash. Now add in all the distractions from safe driving, cell phones, head phones with Ipods, Now consider all the drivers on the road that never had any formal training before they got a drivers licence. Now consider all the transients from other states, country's that don't know know our local driving intricacies. Now consider all these things and it is no wonder that driving in the Washington/Baltimore corridor is the most dangerous in the United States.
If you ask the average driver who has right of way between one getting on the freeway and one getting off the freeway, I would be surprised if 50% of the drivers on the road would get the answer right. The driver getting on has the right of way because he has to speed up to 65MPH to go with the speed of traffic. The driver getting off must slow down for a curved off ramp anyway, so he should always let the other driver go by while exiting. Another of my favorites is not driving in the left lane, that is a passing lane. No one has any business driving in the left lane at less than normal speed. When people pass on the right side this makes our roads very dangerous, and I have seen many do this because of Slow-Pokers in the speed lane. Another big problem on our roads are drivers who drive less than a car length behind another, and flash lights, honk horns, to get around a car. This can be seen as aggressive behavior, and has been the cause for many problems on our roads.
I write about Rules of the Road is because we have too many drivers on our roads who do not understand them. We have no one teaching them. We don't teach our young drivers in the same manner for Drivers Education like we used to do. Young drivers are the most dangerous on the road because they have the least experience. We can give them more experience in school and we should. We need to bring this service back to public schools.
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