The safety of teen drivers is not just a personal responsibility but a real public issue that touches families, communities, and society overall. Too many young drivers are involved in accidents every day that could have been prevented with better preparation, more awareness, and stronger education. As someone who learned to drive in France before moving to the United States, I have seen firsthand the differences in driver education, cultural attitudes, and road safety. These experiences have shaped my strong belief that education is at the heart of saving lives on the road.

In France, getting a driver’s license is nothing like here. First, you need to be 18 before you can drive alone. Then, most young adults spend around 2 years preparing before they can even take the final exam. We start by driving dozens of hours with a professional instructor, who himself has gone through special training to know precisely how to teach us. After that, we get a specific learner’s license that lets us drive with our parents for about 1,500 miles, but never alone. With this license, we are subject to lower speed limits and must meet regularly with our instructor to ensure we are learning correctly. Only after all of this can we take the final exam, which lasts about an hour and includes highway driving, maneuvers such as parallel parking, and even answering legal, safety, and mechanical questions.

This process makes us take driving extremely seriously. We know it is not just about getting from one place to another, but an art that requires practice over and over again. From the very beginning, we are taught that driving is dangerous, that it requires our full attention at all times, and that it is never to be treated like a game. That mindset, I believe, is what makes French roads statistically safer than American ones, even though traffic can be more complicated in Europe’s narrow streets and crowded cities.  

When I moved to America, I was shocked by how easy it was to get a license compared to what I had experienced in France. The process is much shorter, with no professional training, and teens who just turned 16 are already allowed to drive independently. It almost felt like getting a license was a simple formality rather than actual preparation for a serious responsibility. This lack of education, combined with the culture of huge trucks and SUVs, can easily give young drivers a false sense of power and control. Behind the wheel of such a massive vehicle, it is easy to feel invincible. That false confidence often translates into risky behaviors like speeding, careless driving, or paying less attention than they should.

But the truth is, accidents don’t forgive. Just thirty seconds of inattention, or driving only ten miles over the speed limit, can destroy lives. For many of us, accidents feel rare in daily life. Still, the truth is that it only takes one moment, one poor decision, to permanently change or even end lives, leaving us on a wheelchair forever, disfiguring a child who wasn’t wearing a seat belt because we were in a rush, or killing our young neighbor on the crosswalk just because we didn’t want to be late at the movie theater. There are real consequences for such small and absurd reasons.

Last summer, while driving through France, I came across billboards that made this reality even more real for me. On several highways, giant signs were telling the story of Kevin, a 21-year-old young man who worked as a maintenance agent. He was killed in March when a car drove too close to him while he was working on the road. The billboard ended with a terrible question: “Whose name will be the next one to replace his?”. Every hour or so, I would pass another one of those signs, and his face haunted me the whole way. It reminded me that accidents are not numbers; they are real lives being destroyed.

That is why driver education should do more than teach people how to park or pass a test. Every teen should be required to watch a movie or hear a testimony showing how destructive accidents can be. We need to feel the human cost of unsafe driving, not just listen to statistics.

Of course, teens themselves have responsibility. They need to commit, not only on paper but because they genuinely believe in it after having realized the gravity of the situation, to small but vital rules: no phone while driving, no driving if use of alcohol or drugs, always respect speed limits, and make sure everyone in the car wears a seat belt, no matter how short the drive. Schools can include serious driver’s education as part of their curriculum, not an optional thing. Communities can launch campaigns by using signs like the ones I saw in France, for instance.

Teen safety is crucial because it protects not only the teens but everyone else on the road. Each choice a young driver makes has the power to either protect lives or shatter them. Education, responsibility, and culture all matter if we want to prevent tragedies.

Kevin’s eyes on the billboard reminded me that we can never take safety for granted. Every time we drive, we carry the lives of others with us. If schools, communities, and young drivers act together, we would be able to make our roads safer and ensure fewer names have to be written on those billboards.