Thursday, June 28, 2007

Be careful driving!

Seems our community has been suffering a lot of auto fatalities recently. In the past 30 days there have been 11 deaths, all under the age of 20!! Just Tuesday night 5 beautiful young ladies were killed in a fiery crash. They had just graduated from high school and now their lives gone. Their accident is even more tragic because the car following them contained 4 of their friends who witnessed the horrifying crash.

I had just been speaking with a co-worker about all the craziness on our roads. Are people not thinking when they drive? Do they forget that they are not invincible? People cut people off, pull out in front of people, talk on cell phones, run red lights, don't obey traffic signs...take chances. Should people be retested? Should driver safety course be mandatory?

Statistics show that for every passenger in a car with a teen their attention to their driving diminishes. When my kids were first driving on their own, I did not allow them to have a passenger for the first 3 months. After that for every month they drove they could add one passenger, but could NEVER have more than 3 passengers in the car. I also did not allow them to drive with anyone who had been driving for under 6 months. They thought I was strict, I wanted to be stricker. I'd tell them I don't want to have to live with you being responsible for the death of a friend, nor do I want your death to be in a friend's car. Both my kids have taken Defensive Driving and the Driver Safety Course. Did it help, I pray so.

So, I will continue to worry about the number of vehicles on the road. I will worry about my husband on his motorcycle and my children when they're out. I'll get a little crazy when we travel. I guess that's my job! Drive carefully, stay safe!

3 comments:

Goodboy Norman Featherstone said...

That's really awful. I'm very sorry to hear about that.

Sandy said...

that is so very horrible. I can't imagine being a parent nowadays. there are many more cars on the roadway and more distractions with cd players and ipods and cell phones and text messaging that I believe lead to causing accidents than when I was starting to drive. I agree that people should be retested but I think it's easy to pass the test but the real test is not being distracted. I think seniors should be retested and have a longer distance driving test. I was hit by an 80-year-old man in 1990. He hit me so hard, I spun off the side of the highway and my ran started sliding down an embankment and it stopped right before it would have gone off into a ravine and landed upside down. Also, if there had been no one else around at the time you could not have been able to see my car had been hit and I was down the embankment. I had to crawl out the window of the car hoping the car would not fall over with me in it. The old man kept going and came back about 10 minutes later. I wonder now if he had been drinking and went to throw his bottle out as he had been down at a fish camp on the river in that area (I found that out later from a friend of mine whose grandparents lived in the area). I was going the 55 mile speed limit on the highway he was crossing in the median and hit me on the side...so it could have been much worse than it ended up being. Thank goodness it wasn't. I remember my mama telling me that day as I was leaving their house up in Alabama on my way back to florida to WEAR YOUR SEATBELT and I did and now I always do!

♥Lisa and The Pug Posse ♥ said...

Wow that is Horrible and so Tragic. I am scared to death thinking that my daughter will be able to get her License in 2 years. UGh! there has been a lot of fatal accidents here too...not as many as your area but we have had 4 this past month.

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