Why can't Johnny drive?

Why Can’t Johnny Drive?
I had a hard time writing this episode, every time I would write, I would get so mad I had to quit, there are a lot of other issues all connected to this one, and it was hard to stick to the one topic. If you are hoping for humor, you won’t find any this month.

Consider the following statements:
NASCAR is the most popular sport in America in terms of number of people watching.

The SCCA Nationals is the most popular sporting event in America in terms of participants, with more than a thousand drivers.

Driving a car is an important and unavoidable part of every day for nearly every person in America..

Auto related deaths are the number one cause of accidental death for people in America.

Dave Despain said something on his show “Wind Tunnel” that really got me to thinking.
He proposed that there should be inter-scholastic karting just like we have high school football and basketball. At first, I thought that was sort of silly, but the more I considered it, the more sense it made, until now I am really annoyed.
The only driving instruction you can get in school is a very brief and inadequate session usually done in the summer and never done again. No advanced training of any kind is available unless you go to Skip Barber or something like that, which is beyond the financial reach of most people.
You are required to participate in some sport like football, and if you’re any good, they’ll send you to college, not to learn of course, but to play more football.
I don’t care what you do as long as it doesn’t harm me, so I don’t care about people playing whatever sport they want, I don’t even hold a grudge about being forced to play those sports as a kid. I didn’t like them then, and still don’t, but I am free to ignore them.
But wait a minute. I own a house now, and a large portion of my taxes go to education, and a large part of that goes to sports. Those sports don’t do me any good whatsoever. Football stadiums, baseball fields, why am I paying for that?
Now consider this. I know someone who crashed their car and 2 people are now dead. This person never had any training in how to drive a car beyond the ridiculous “drivers training” that we have all had when we were about 15. Didn’t care about driving, didn’t take it seriously, saw no purpose in learning how to really drive. When the time came for an instinctive reaction to an emergency situation, those skills were not there. There was alcohol involved, and that would be a convenient scapegoat, but I am quite sure that the lack of driving skill was the real problem.
We live in a society where it is nearly impossible to not drive every day, and most people drive about 10,000 miles a year. It is ludicrous to think you can avoid a panic situation, yet there is no training for that, and no place to learn how to respond to those situations. Where I was working last week, there were some skid marks that went in a perfectly straight line down the highway for about 200 feet, and then right off the edge of the highway into the river. Any of our autocrosssers would have let off the brakes and back onto the highway.
If you live in an area that never has any snow, where could you possibly practice the car control skills you need when the unexpected happens? Autocross, or Karts, that’s where.
I’ve been driving for 30 years now and haven’t hit another car since I was 16 and driving like a jackass. But I had to learn how to drive on backroads, in the snow, and all the while feeling like a criminal. I was certainly never encouraged to learn how to really drive. Why is it I would have been a hero had I played basketball, but I was a dirtbag cause I preferred to learn to do a bootleg turn?
At the SCC event I was worried about spectator safety, the possibility of one of our racers hitting a curb, and cars wandering onto the course. None of these things would be an issue if we had some kind of permanent facility.
I think it is perfectly reasonable that we should have a place where we could do our sport, but more importantly, where driver training of all types could be done. Winter driving schools for people who have never done that before, training similar to an autocross before you get your license, a safe place for people to push the limits of a different car when they buy one, and the place where we could have high school Kart teams.
The cost of such a place would be very low, after all, we have been using the parking lot of the EWU football stadium for years. It could still be used as a parking lot at other times as well.

If society can afford to build stadiums for games, it can certainly afford to build a facility that would save lives.