This past weekend, I was driving in downtown Starkville when a red compact car swerved out in front of me, forced me into the next lane and indirectly knocked my sunglasses onto the floor. After shouting many, many non-expletives, it became apparent drivers in Mississippi are not quite the safest.
Hailing from Louisiana, it is easy to juxtapose the drivers of Starkville with the drivers from back home. Of course, there could be many reasons as to why Mississippi State University drivers are less cautious (e.g. reckless college kids), but one thing really seems to stick out: the lack of state-mandated driver education to get a permit or license. To clarify, I am not by any means preaching government intervention. However, driving is a privilege, not a right.
When I was informed driver education is not required to get a permit in the state of Mississippi, I was frankly appalled. Louisiana is by no means a responsible state (hence “Swamp People”), yet the driving laws there are much more comprehensive.
For example, in Louisiana, it is illegal for anyone to text and drive. In Mississippi, there is no such legislation. Is stopping the texting really that unreasonable?
Furthermore, perhaps Mississippi is breeding bad driving. A study published in Cerebral Cortex and perpetuated by CNN shows a person’s tendency to send a vehicle careening off of the road is possibly genetic. Steven Cramer, a neurological professor at UC Irvine, has isolated a certain gene variant that may cause people to perform more than 30 percent worse on a driving test than people without it. Cramer concluded that “these people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away.” By allowing distractions to continue, we are allowing at-risk people to be even riskier and, even worse, to allow the gene of a bad driver to become refined and passed on to a future generation.
Bad drivers also hit us where it hurts the most: the wallet (excluding head and limbs). From a financial perspective, your high insurance premiums are caused primarily by bad drivers. Insurance companies are not usually evil corporate conglomerates. They don’t want to raise premiums, they simply must to accommodate for money they pay out in the form of claims. If everyone on the road was a good driver, or if technology allowed the number of accidents to diminish, auto insurance would cost next to nothing. Again, it isn’t the responsible drivers affecting us; it’s the ones who have car-hugged a pole five or six times because they were fixing their makeup or looking for their wallets.
But, lastly, the fault lies with everyone to a certain extent. We make it “cool” to drive as soon as possible and criticize those who get their licenses late. Remember when you couldn’t wait to get your license at the ripe age of 16? I do. I could hardly write and think at the same time, let alone operate a two-ton vehicle at high speeds while assessing my surroundings with the skill of an NFL quarterback. But who cares? All of my friends were doing it, so I just had to as well. Waiting until a more mature age was obviously unreasonable.
I’ve lost my share of friends to vehicular accidents, and it always strikes a deep chord. Whether at the hands of a habitual drunk driver, or the driver’s poor decision-making skills, they always seem to be avoidable; but they never seem to be foreseeable.
We place great trust in each other not to make bad decisions while driving. How many times have you passed oncoming traffic and thought, “That car could have taken my life?” Not very often, but it’s a definite possibility. Does society really appreciate the power of a driver’s license? Does it truly feel like a privilege, and not a right? If we put our collective minds into more austere driving laws, our friends wouldn’t become just another statistic, and the magnitude of car accidents wouldn’t just be an ugly fact of life.
Tim McGrath is a freshman majoring in aerospace engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].