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The
Driving
Challenge
Dare to Be Safer
and Happier
on the Road
Phil Berardelli
Mountain Lake Press
Mountain Lake Park, Maryland
The Driving Challenge: Dare to Be Safer and Happier on the Road
Copyright © 2011 Phil Berardelli
All Rights Reserved
Published in eBook format by Mountain Lake Press
Converted by http://eBookIt.com
ISBN 13: 978-0-9846512-3-8
Cover design by Michael Hentges
Original design by Tom Huestis
ALSO BY PHIL BERARDELLI
Safe Young Drivers: A Guide for Parents and Teens
Available as an ebook.
For Bobby
5/20/1949–10/25/1998
PREFACE
Why a Challenge?
I wrote The Driving Challenge during the spring of 2001 and published it in the summer of that year—before, as I often say, the world changed on September 11.
Indeed, the world has changed since then—or at least large parts of it. As happened at the beginning of World War II, and again during what became known as the Cold War, we have been overtaken by history, and much of what we once thought was important has shrunk to insignificance.
One aspect of our world has remained depressingly the same, however. It’s the way people drive on our highways, and it’s every bit as much of a threat to our lives as terrorism.
I admit I probably look at the situation on the roads a little differently than most, because I have been writing about the subject for nearly 20 years. So naturally I tend to pay more attention to what is happening. That distinction aside—or rather because of that distinction—I can say with some confidence that our roads continue to be dangerous, angry, even ugly places.
I’ll get into the specifics later, but for now suffice it to say we’re dealing with one of the biggest public-health problems in America. It kills tens of thousands and injures millions of people each year. Therefore this is not just an academic exercise or intellectual argument—it literally is a matter of life and death. Driving is the most dangerous thing we all do every day.
As I said, I’ve been writing and speaking about this topic for quite a few years, and very little has changed during that time. People still behave badly in large numbers on the roads, and heaven help me if I deign to point out anyone’s faulty or outright bad behavior—be they strangers, friends or family.
That’s the most baffling and frustrating aspect of this topic: Few people seem willing to examine their own contribution to the problem, and even fewer want to consider changing the way they drive, but many take offense at the idea that they might not be driving well or properly.
This is worse than stupid—it’s tragic. Here we are, over a decade into the second century of the Age of the Automobile. We’re a nation of more than 200 million motorists driving nearly as many vehicles. We’re a culture full of car magazines, car columnists, car-talk shows on the radio, and car-preview shows on TV. We own more automobiles, trucks, SUVs and vans than bathtubs or televisions. Until the cell-phone and texting craze began, we owned more vehicles than phones, too.
Yet in all this preoccupation, this near-obsession with vehicles, we exercise no comparable devotion to the development of good driving skills or the establishment of a competent and safe driving population. Sad but true: We lack a good-driving culture. Our programs of organized instruction—high-school driver-education courses and commercial driving schools—remain marginal in their effectiveness. Worse, as I’ll discuss later, some segments of our society actually encourage or even glorify dangerous driving.
Our priorities are out of whack. We devote endless media space and huge amounts of money promoting and analyzing superficial differences between makes and models. As individuals, we respond enthusiastically to this persuasion. We’ll spend hours searching for just the right vehicle that suits us and haggling over the price we pay.
By the same token, few of us devote nearly as much time and effort to something vastly more essential: our personal safety on the road. We regard driving—if we think about it at all—as an incidental part of getting where we want to go.
None of this means we shouldn’t try to change things. Other national campaigns have succeeded, facing just as much indifference or even outright opposition. We can find parallels in related subjects such as seatbelts, child safety seats and, especially, drunk driving. Extensive public-service campaigns, conducted over many years, have managed to change the behavior of a significant segment of the public. Compared with 20 years ago, far fewer of us drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. We also buckle up more, and most of us protect our children properly inside our vehicles.
Despite these efforts, millions of motorists—about 20 percent—still refuse to wear seatbelts. Police continue to arrest thousands upon thousands on DUI charges each year, and more than a few adults remain shockingly clueless about properly restraining their children—or in sufficiently preparing their fledgling teen drivers for the road.
We can react in two ways to this information. One is to complain about how many people act irresponsibly and cause so many unnecessary injuries and deaths. The other is to look at how many people have responded to calls for better behavior. Although the rates of unbelted vehicle occupants and impaired drivers remain too high, those rates nevertheless have been dropping. Some of us are listening. We are doing the right things, and fewer tragedies are resulting.
Now we need to expand our attention to a problem that’s just as serious. We need to deal with bad driving, because how we drive matters, as does how we treat one another on the highways. The consequences of driving carelessly or aggressively are and have been horrible. Bad driving is killing and injuring us at a persistently huge rate.
It’s time we focused on driving in the same way we have addressed the other highway-safety issues. And it’s time to put aside fantasies about sheet metal for a while and concentrate on what’s going on inside our vehicles—inside our heads.
That’s my challenge.
I am determined to persuade you, and as many other people as I can, to fight the highway madness. Here’s the good news: It’s not only possible, it’s downright easy. I’m not proposing some high-performance driving course here. You don’t need to undertake any intensive study. All of the techniques are simple, but they can make a big difference in your safety. You can adopt them quickly with a modest amount of practice. The key is to want to make the effort.
That’s your challenge.
You need to recognize that there really is a way for you to be safer and happier on the road, starting with the next time you drive. First, though, you must do something that is unique in our culture: You must reexamine your driving attitude and behavior. This book will show you how. Take the time to read it carefully and think about what it suggests. If my approach makes sense, then seriously consider putting it into practice.
I’ve tried