Wheels

A Personal Side to Driving Tragedies

Saturday, May 24, 2008

I love love love the recent experiment in Oshawa, Ontario of having students confront speeding drivers with essays and pleas to slow down.

If making it about money doesn’t work, you have to personalize it. And getting people out of their self-contained little automotive omniworlds to come physically face to face with the consequences of their choices is a searing way to do it.

The inherent message – “you speed, I die” – is lost on most of us. I let my son Christopher drive in rush hour traffic across town yesterday. People were flinging themselves out of sideroads, cutting into traffic, blowing off red lights and blocking intersections with abandon.

“Did you see that?” he asked, repeatedly, incredulous.
“Yes. And it’s your job to see it now when you drive,” I told him.
“But, they’re crazy!”

I explained they are indeed crazy. They’re no longer driving. They’re starting dinner, they’re picking up kids, they’re wondering if The Office is a rerun tonight, they’re answering the phone, they’re angry that getting home on time tonight means they have to go in early tomorrow, and they’re peeved that gas has gone up again, and they should have filled up this morning. They hate that the person in front of them obeyed the yellow light. They’re swearing that they missed the advanced green. They are doing everything but driving.

And someone, somewhere, is going to die.

When you’ve been in an accident, it changes how you drive. Instructor Ian Law tells me he teaches many drivers who have had their confidence shaken. They’re not bad drivers, but they’ve been hugely impacted by bad drivers. But human nature seems to indicate that until it’s personal, it’s not important. If these students can make a seemingly innocuous moment – speeding in a residential zone – personal, schools everywhere should be doing it.

I clip out heartbreaking stories of young lives lost, especially at this time of year, due to a moment of youthful indiscretion. I remember feeling bullet proof. I don’t expect my sons to feel otherwise, but I need them to see that kids just like themselves – good kids, funny kids, smart kids, reckless kids – can make stupid choices that will haunt them if they’re lucky enough get to live to be haunted.

I’m shameless in leveraging the personal. I toss down photos of my 15-year-old self and my boyfriend at the time. At our cottage, or washing his car, or horsing around with friends. I throw down one particularly beautiful picture of him, taken a year or so before a drunk driver killed him when I was 17. I tell them I took that photo, and he is forever frozen in time.

My sons didn’t know him, but they do know me. Christopher is starting to drive, some of his friends already do. He knows my concern is tinged with the personal battering I endured 27 years ago, and that my lesson is destined to be his. I am not neurotic; I don’t presume all young drivers are bad drivers. But I do believe all drivers are capable of making choices that can severely alter, or end, their own lives or those of others.

If laws and fines can’t convince you to drive safely enough to protect yourself, maybe the only thing left is an in-your-face shot at the damage you can do to others.  Kudos to Durham officer Keith Richards for a program designed to force drivers to measure the impact of their actions.

After the fact is always too late.

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