Is driver’s education enough?

Enough?

WRITING AND ART By OLIvER FIcHTE

Thousands of teenagers line up at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) annually to get their driver’s licenses. With the education they had received in the months prior, are they prepared for the dangerous roads that lie ahead?

According to Rhino Car Hire’s Drive Smart page, American teenagers get their licenses earlier than 90% of teenagers in other countries. With so many new and young drivers on the road, the competence of driver’s education has come under question.

According to the DMV, teenagers must take 25 hours of classroom instruction or home study or Internet training program, six hours of behindthe-wheel training, and 50 hours of supervised driving practice.

Despite all this, “traffic safety researchers concede that driver education and training, even when well designed and rigorous, have not been shown to reliably reduce the crash rates of young drivers,” according to a DMV study.

In addition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s transportation safety page, people aged 16-19 are still at the highest risk for accidents. This raises the concern that a lack of proper driver’s education is directly causing this trend with teen drivers.

Ken Wang, a licensed driving instructor, operator, and the owner of Bay Cities Driving School, thinks that online driver’s education doesn’t live up to the standard of its in-person counterpart. Nonetheless, according to Wang, it gets the job done; it prepares students enough to take the permit test and pass it. However, it’s a different story when students get behind the wheel.

“It varies by the individual. Most of them have retained something,” Wang said. “Not all of them have retained everything, that’s for sure.”

While driving with students, Wang and his fellow instructors often quiz them about their knowledge, to mixed results. While memorizing facts and rules can get students past the DMV’s permit test, it doesn’t teach them about physically handling a vehicle and avoiding accidents.

“I think the more important thing for collision and crash prevention is the behind-the-wheel training, which you get after you do the written part,” Wang said.

But even though behind-the-wheel training is more effective for preventing accidents, the DMV only requires it for new drivers under 18; those learning to drive at 18 or older are exempt, and it shows.

“The accident rates are much higher for those who didn’t take behind-thewheel training,” Wang said. “Those kids are less likely to pass [the license test] the first time, and they’re more likely to get in an accident if they do pass.”

Wang wishes that the government would make behind-the-wheel training mandatory for all new drivers to go the extra mile for traffic safety.

Regardless, some teenage drivers still find that these classes are more trouble than they’re worth.

Valentina Espinosa, a senior at Carlmont, felt that her online driver’s education class had provided a sufficient foundation but struggled to remember and apply its content to real life.

“Once I got into the car, I either didn’t remember or the [content was] not very applicable in actual situations,” Espinosa said.

Road markings were a challenging aspect of driver’s education that Espinosa wished she would have learned about more clearly.

“I didn’t know the difference between a double yellow line and a white line and when you’re supposed to turn on red,” Espinosa said. “I would be sitting in my car with my dad, and my dad would be like: ‘How did you not learn that in driver’s ed?’”

Although driver’s education was tedious, difficult to remember, and not as applicable to everyday situations as Espinosa would have liked, it was still a good base. But like Wang, she found behind-the-wheel training to be far more helpful.

Maya Nayberg, a Carlmont junior, recalls many vital aspects of her driver’s education course. She also recognizes the sheer amount of unnecessary statistics thrown in her face during the class, none of which have stuck with her.

“You can’t utilize the statistics when you’re driving every day,” Nayberg said.

Even though the information in her class was necessary, the format failed to prioritize practical, real-life knowledge.

“My driver’s ed was weird,” Nayberg said. “It was a lot of information, but there were only a few chapters that I learned from and was able to apply that knowledge to when [I was driving] on the road.”

In addition to this, she wishes that she had received more training with the controls of her car.

“There’s often been a lot of instances where I knew what to do; I just didn’t know how to do it with my car,” Nayberg said.

Nayberg, like Espinosa and Wang, also emphasized the greater importance of behind-the-wheel training compared to the online course.

“With the online driving [course], you’re just given a lot of information that you can’t apply yet because you haven’t been behind the wheel on the road,” Nayberg said.

It seems that practice is key in the world of driver’s education. Especially at this age, all young drivers need to take safety and their education seriously to make the road accessible and safe for all.

“You can know all the rules, but if you can’t control the car, that’s a whole different story,” Wang said.