The Driving Challenge: Dare to Be Safer and Happier on the Road

Phil Berardelli

Description

20,000 Collisions Waiting to Happen.

That's what faces America's driving population each and every day. No wonder. An exploding population of poorly-trained, overconfident, aggressive drivers cram themselves into a barely-growing network of pavement. That's why crashes shut down parts of our metropolitan arteries almost daily. It's why bad weather always brings a spike in the number of incidents. And it's why driving remains the most dangerous thing most of us do in our lives.

The Driving Challenge was written to help reduce the odds that you'll be involved in one of those 20,000 daily collisions. It is drawn from Phil Berardelli's years of painstaking observations and research, and from his own experiences as a reformed aggressive driver. Just as in Safe Young Drivers, his acclaimed book for parents and teens, Phil provides sound advice and simple rules that can make a big difference in your safety - starting with the next time you slip behind the wheel.

You can be safer and happier on the road. All it requires is a willingness to change - to refuse to accept the status quo on the roads any longer.

Sujets

• Self-help

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 26 août 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780984651238
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
 
http://mountainlakepress.com
 
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 to construct a basic philosophy you can use behind the wheel, one that promotes safety, sanity and good manners. If you use this philosophy every time you drive, you can not only protect yourself and those around you, but you can also stop being part of the problem. You can take a decisive step toward countering the tide of damage, injury, death and heartbreak that pervades our highways.
But this process will work only if you resolve to be honest with yourself. You must confront your driving habits, completely and without hesitation. Maybe you’ll have to admit that what you’ve been doing hasn’t been in your best interests, or in the best interests of the passengers you carry, or of the others who encounter you along the highways.
If that turns out to be the case—if your self-examination leads you to realize you’ve been driving badly—then by all means stop it! But don’t waste a moment feeling guilty. That helps no one, least of all you. Instead, concentrate on what you’re going to do now—concentrate on how you are going to deal with your newfound insight.
For heaven’s sake, what have you got to lose? Tension? Impatience? Fear? Anger? Are these emotions worth holding onto? Let them go, and try something new that actually pays you benefits—something that simultaneously reduces your risks and your stress. It involves amazingly little: some restraint, common sense, maturity and a desire to change for the better. Significant adjustments, yes, but the results can be major. Very quickly you can be a smarter, safer, happier driver, no matter what is going on around you.
Doubt it will work?
I dare you to try.
 
 
INTRODUCTION
A Confession and a Disclosure
Every time I drive, I use all of the techniques I recommend in this book. I’m not perfect at it, of course. Sometimes I slip up. Once in a while I become impatient or irritated—just a little, enough to make an out-loud comment or two about the traffic snarl that has captured me or about what somebody nearby is doing.
Or, sometimes I neglect to look in all directions before making a move, and suddenly I find there’s another vehicle in a space I had assumed was empty—a vehicle occupied by a driver who’s now making an out-loud comment about me.
Or, every so often, I notice that my speed has climbed above the limit.
I mention these things as a way of pointing out that I’m just like everybody else: human and fallible. I make plenty of mistakes. I just don’t want you to think that you’re about to read a book written by someone with a holier-than-thou attitude. That’s not what it’s about—casting blame and pointing fingers, index or otherwise. The roads are full of such behavior already, as is much of modern life.
It’s a dangerous and angry environment out there, and I don’t want to a