Taking your car out for a drive on the open road is one of the best feelings in the world. You don’t have much on your mind, and the experience itself is more relaxing than most things out there. It can also be quite exciting if you are one of the people who enjoy the thrill and rush of high speeds. Unfortunately, things don’t always end well on the road, and accidents do happen more often than we’d like to admit.
This is why you need to be careful out there and drive safely. Here’s why you should avoid aggressive driving.
Avoiding accidents
Aggressive driving puts you and those around you on the road at the risk of accidents. It is as simple as that. Behaviors like tailgating and suddenly changing lanes can be quite dangerous on the road, and this is why a lot of accidents happen in the first place. You might think you will get to your destination faster if you do such things, and even if that were true, is it really worth risk crashing your car?
Studies have shown that many countries suffer from terrible accidents each day; if you live in Boston, we’re sure you know a recent report has claimed aggressive driving is very common in Boston. Another study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety showed that aggressive driving is what causes car accidents in 56% of fatal crashes –– mostly due to excessive speeding! This goes to show that this behavior that you take so lightly can have catastrophic consequences and affect not only your life, but also that of those around you. This brings us to the following point.
Avoiding legal complications
Assuming you don’t really care about people’s lives, or your own, you need to avoid aggressive driving for other reasons. Even if you made it out of an accident unharmed, you will still be liable to legal prosecution due to your reckless behavior. If you drove at ridiculously high speeds or changed lanes out of nowhere and that resulted in a crash with another car, you can rest assured that the other person will sue, and they should. They would have repair costs to take care of, in addition to medical bills if they were injured and even emotional suffering caused by you recklessly crashing into their vehicle.
In case you didn’t know it, you can end up facing up to one year in jail due to reckless and aggressive driving, as it is considered a misdemeanor. This is definitely legal trouble you could do without, and you can if you just drove safely.
Saving money
Legal complications entail you paying a lot of money. If you caused a car accident, you can rest assured your insurance company will up your premiums and charge you for a lot of money, because they will have to compensate the other person. On the other hand, you will also be paying for your own car repairs and medical bills if you were the person to cause the accident, which means you could end up paying a lot of money that you could have easily saved if you just drove safely.
Protecting pedestrian lives
A lot of car accidents end up with a person hitting a pedestrian crossing the street on even on the sidewalk because the driver lost control over their vehicle. It is a terrible tragedy for a person to hit a pedestrian, because they would most likely end up dead. Swerving all of a sudden or changing lanes, speeding, and tailgating could all jeopardize people’s lives on the street. And killing someone because you ‘felt the need for speed’ isn’t something you recover from. It haunts you for all of your life and you never recover from that. This is why you need to avoid aggressive driving at all costs. You will not only be protecting pedestrian lives, but also maintaining your sanity and mental well-being.
Obeying the traffic laws
You need to avoid aggressive driving to simply obey traffic laws. They are there for a reason, and if you ignore them, then you might get into serious trouble with law enforcement as explained earlier. It doesn’t even need to be an accident for you to get in trouble with the law. Running a red light can get you into all sorts of trouble, even if you don’t hit a person or crash into a car. Obeying traffic laws keeps you safe and keeps your driving in check, which is something you need to do.
At the end of the day, driving safely rather than aggressively protects lives, including your own. No matter how fun you think it is and how much you enjoy it, it is simply not worth it and your life will be all the better for it if you avoid aggressive driving.
