Imagine having a driver fiddling with the sound system and asking their voice control assistant to schedule a meeting, while making a difficult turn. The music is loud enough you don’t hear the honks of the cars behind you, you’re busy looking at your phone that you don’t notice how close the signage is, and the turn actually has a blockade on it. A hypothetical scenario that is close enough to reality for many. That is ‘impaired driving’ for me - any form of distraction that stimulates your five senses and pulls your attention from the road. Young drivers forget that even having music playing in loud volumes within the car can be known as ‘impaired driving’. 

According to the CDC, the order of most causes for impaired driving is seen higher among teens than among any other age group. High risk for these crashes include males, teens driving with other teens, newly licensed teens. Most of these young drivers face various risk factors such as inexperience, nighttime and weekend driving, not using seat belts, distracted driving, speeding, drinking alcohol, using drugs or substances. Distracted driving due to a text message, talking on a cell phone, or using a navigation system and eating while driving is the most common way drivers cause unsafe behavior on the road. They cause the driver to take their eyes off the road, take their hands off the wheel and their minds off the driving.  

My father works behind a computer screen for an abnormally large part of his day. He is also the family’s designated driver for long trips and travel. On a particular day, we had been driving back home. All of us had been awake and alert for the drive back, fighting the sleep that hits anyone in the latter half of a hot summer day. The radio was playing a program with prominent actors voicing characters from a beloved story - when I felt drowsy. My eyes drooped with tiredness, and I felt my head tuck into my chest. I was sitting in the front passenger seat, my mother and younger sister in the back. We were almost home, just twenty minutes away, on a road with no traffic. All of a sudden, I was jerked awake because the car was scraped by a cement divider and my dad was apologizing loudly. Turns out, he was feeling his body tire out, and his eyes were shutting - he did not realize that his hands were turning slack and the steering had taken a mind of its own. We all jolted awake, rolled down the windows and tried to initiate a stimulating conversation for the leftover part of the journey. My younger sister and I were on the side of the car that hit the divider and both of us still talk about how our hearts were in our palms that day. We both try to keep our parents engaged in conversation on long road trips now, because the fear of what fatigue caused our car to do scared us to our bones.

Driver’s education and traffic school courses are beneficial to learn about the specific traffic signs and road rules for different kinds of roads, state variations, and times of both year and day. Coming from an expert, the attitudes and behaviors around impaired driving can change because the instructor can pull from personal experiences and stories - ones that the student can relate to. These instructors can provide real-world advice on how to navigate roads, when there’s an impaired driving causing harm. Living in Indiana, I believe that it is beneficial for me to learn from experts on how to drive safely even while others around me drive recklessly and without a care about the rules. Risky driving is exacerbated by other weather conditions such as heavy rain, strong winds, and snow that decreases visibility. Instructors have the resources to provide to their students onto how best to measure their physical capacity and determine the ability to drive through such unpredicted weather situations.

As someone whose fingers itch for her phone, I am well-aware of the driving mode on my phone. I recommend many of my friends to turn it on, so that they are not distracted by multiple notifications. With my parents, I always remind them to only answer phone calls for a brief moment of time and through the car’s bluetooth enabled features. Any text can wait till the car is pulled into a secured parking spot. My driving instructor and the material I have learned through the written segment of the driving test is to always have both hands on the steering wheel. These are simple practices that can help a driver be more alert and safe on the road. Mental Health Counselors often see clients who are stressed about their work hours, and about long travel time. With my ability to help such clients - I want to take that moment to remind them about road safety and pull up the statistics about impaired driving.