Omar Tantawi:Car Accidents

Dejan Stojanovic said, “Accidents are not accidents ,but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.” Car accidents happen every day, everywhere. Anyone in a vehicle is in risk, the risk of car accidents. Yearly, thousands of people die and get injured due to car accident. Unfortunately, some causes of car accidents can be avoided but not all. As a result, more injuries and death can occur. However, car accidents still have several causes with various effects. Texting while driving has had the highest rate of car accidents’ causes. That has been why there has been an NGO called "Youth Association for Social Awareness" (YASA) ,working on many fields to raise the awareness of people about this issue. For instance, there has existed numerous billboards on the border of many roads on which drivers can easily notice the following precise remark "avoid texting while driving". In addition, my friend has passed away due to this snag. Going back, on April 2013, I lost my friend because he was chatting using his phone. When he was driving, he did not pay attention to the border of the street, so he went outside the road and passed away upon having a crash with a tree. Moreover, there was a study ,conducted by Honda Company in 2013, indicating that the risk to make mistakes and have an accident has increased tremendously when the driver texted. Drinking while driving can also contribute to rendering a car accident. In fact, the 31 December of each year has the highest rate of car accidents since people drink a lot on such a day. For instance, last year, the ministry of interior tried to solve this problem by offering free taxi to get people from their places to their homes. Moreover, statistics show that most serious road accidents are caused by drinking while driving, according to the head of the Traffic Experts’ Association. Likewise, “Even when there are accidents ,they will record if there has been dangerous driving or speeding but not drink driving. According to the Youth Association for Social Awareness (YASA),there is almost zero implementation of this law,” complained Gebran,the head of YASA.. Speed, like drinking and texting, has equal importance in raising the rate of car accidents. For this reason, the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities had used to put radars across the roads to make sure that people will not exceed the limit of speed. For instance , my cousin got around five speed tickets ,each amounting more than 50,000 LL. In addition, speeding makes the driver unable to control the car like what happened yesterday. There was a person named Bakker ,who was going home at an extremely high speed on a tiny road;therefore, he could not control the car when the speed reached 160 Km/h and had crashed into the wall. Additionally, brakes did not help enough in such sudden cases. As a conclusion, texting, drinking, and speeding while driving are causes of car accident. Even if death and injuries are the two popular effects, there will be many other causes that have many different effects in diverse fields. For example, when someone drives at 100 Km/h- which is the highest limit of speed permitted by law- he needs 11 meters to stop. This was for 100 Km/h, but what about more than 100 Km/h? The question remains as follows: When will people respect laws and will understand that these laws are issued only for their help?