A Day at Driving School

I was an innocent in a room full of innocents, forced to give up an entire Saturday for defensive driving school. Well… OK, I wasn’t exactly innocent. In fact, I was probably speeding. But I certainly wasn’t speeding to the extent the officer claimed I was. And I most definitely was not endangering anyone on that remote stretch of road where the only vehicles were a DPS cruiser and the car I was driving.

He claimed to have clocked me at 85 mph. Maybe, but if I’d been going 85 miles per hour, my passenger – a dear friend and the owner of the vehicle – would have been screaming her head off. She agrees I wasn’t going that fast. And, eventually, so did the officer, who said he’d write me up at 73 in a 65-mph zone – that way it wouldn’t qualify as a “criminal speeding” violation.

I didn’t even know what that meant at the time, because I was panicked to learn that this simple little violation – this few miles over the speed limit on a remote road with nobody to endanger – meant that I was either going to defensive driving school or getting three points on my license.

In Arizona, that’s considered a “choice.” Well, I wasn’t about to endanger my license and insurance rates by taking the points, even though the fine for the ticket was less than the fee for the school.
My friend said she’d been to driving school, and it was kind of fun, but I knew she was just kidding and trying to get me out of my sour mood.

As I calmed down, I said that the only good thing that could come from this would be if we stopped at Apache Gold Casino, which was right down the road, and I won enough money to cover traffic school.
We did – and I did.

So, I got home and made a date for defensive driving school. And, to my amazement, I learned that many people I know had already been there.

ur teacher was a guy named Kevin who adopted a “Soup Nazi” attitude from the moment we walked in. You know the Soup Nazi, from Seinfeld. He was the guy who made fabulous soup, but if you ticked him off in any way, he’d ban you from his restaurant and refuse – flat-out re-fuse – to serve you soup. People stepped very lightly around the Soup Nazi.

Kevin yelled as he was checking us in, saying there were rules on the bulletin board and we had to know them by the time we got to his desk or we’d be sent to the back of the line. The rules directed us to have our paperwork and money order – cash and checks aren’t allowed in traffic school – at the ready. It wasn’t much to ask, of course, and it did ensure that all 65 of us got signed in efficiently, but it was the barking of orders that turned me off.

It only got worse. Kevin’s No. 1 rule was that if you came back late from breaks, you couldn’t get back in, and you’d have to re-peat the class. I can see why it would be disruptive to have people straggling in, but Kevin had no “give” in his rules. So, the poor boy who walked in after Kevin had uttered just two sentences was thrown out. When it came time for a lunch break, almost everyone ran to a fast-food place and came back to eat at their desks.

Humor wasn’t Kevin’s strong point, and I think I ticked him off from the start. “Was anyone forced to be here today?” he asked, and I shot up my hand. “No, you weren’t forced,” he told me with a scowl. “You all chose to be here.” At that moment, I knew Kevin had trouble with reality.

I’ll give him points, though, for trying to make us feel better. I bet he thought we would be less miserable about being holed up in a bland hotel meeting room on Thomas Road on a Saturday, which was one of the first beautiful spring Saturdays of the year, if we thought we’d exercised our free will to be there.

Kevin promised we were going to actually learn some new things, because, “They don’t tell you some of this stuff unless you read the entire traffic code.” I don’t know a single person who’s ever read the entire traffic code, so I figured this could be something valuable.

Turns out, he was right. I did learn some new things and did get shocked by a few discoveries. What’s more, there were even a couple scares, which is just what the class is supposed to do.

Our class voted these as the three main reasons for traffic accidents: speed, inattention and arrogance. (Kevin told us we were the first class in 10 months that didn’t put “cell phones” at the top of the list.)
He acknowledged that we were on track, but cited an Arizona study that found the top three were: “speed too fast for conditions,” “intoxication” and “aggressive driving.”

Before cameras were installed on the Loop 101 in Scottsdale, Kevin said tests found that the average speed on that stretch was 110 miles per hour, and the highest was 186. Seems high, but that’s what he said.
Regardless of the exact numbers, our roadways are extremely dangerous. Kevin told us that in Arizona, one person dies every eight hours in a traffic accident. In the United States, 117 people die each day. The economic loss in Arizona from traffic accidents each year amounts to $549.18 for every man, woman and child in the state.

I was well aware that speed was a killer, and I’ve been writing stories for far too long about how alcohol is a deadly mix, but I was shocked to learn the degree to which “inattention” is a danger.

Inattention includes a lot of things that should not be done while driving: reading (hello!), text messaging (duh!), eating and drinking, putting on makeup, tying neckties, attending to kids and pets and friends, and playing music so loud that you can’t hear anything else (including emergency vehicles).

And, of course, it includes those pesky cell phones, which are even more dangerous than I’d imagined.
“Talking on a cell phone impairs a driver more than if he were legally drunk,” Kevin told us. Think about that – more impaired than if you’re drunk! That should be a wakeup call.

Kevin also noted that New York has made it illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving, and Arizona is considering following suit. I admit that I’ve used a cell phone while driving, but not anymore. If one thing came out of this, it stopped me from doing that.

Arrogance, in my opinion, is the root of most nasty drivers. Arrogant drivers have appointed themselves kings and queens of the road and think they can do anything. They’re almost always speeding, shifting lanes like a NASCAR driver, following too closely, cutting folks off, passing on the right, running red lights… you name it. Arizona now even has a category called “aggressive drivers,” which is any combination of those things. Conviction means six months in jail.

And then there is a little thing called criminal speeding – a phrase the DPS officer used when he pulled me over, but which meant nothing special to me that day. I learned that it means you’re going 20 miles over the posted speed limit, and you could get a month in jail. That’s when I realized that the DPS officer was being very kind that day to write me up at just 73 mph.

All of the above were important lessons, and here are some of the other things I learned in that class:

• In Arizona, you’re only allowed to change one lane at a time, and making an “unsafe lane change” can get you arrested.
• In this state, you’re required to use your traffic signal every time you change lanes.
• A drunken driver with a child in the car gets an automatic “extreme DUI” ticket, as well as jail time.
• When making a left turn, you must yield to any vehicle.
• Green means “go” only if the way is clear.
• Defensive driving school is the one “mulligan” you get in Arizona.
• If I get another traffic ticket in the next two years, I face a hefty fine and automatic points on my record. Plus, I have to go to a two-day school.

In the end, Kevin asked us to fill out an evaluation form on how he did as a teacher. Was he clear? Did he cover all the major points? Did we learn anything?

Nowhere on the sheet did it ask if he’d been a Soup Nazi at the start of the day, but by that point, I had to give him credit for teaching us a lot and scaring us enough to be safer drivers.
So, I gave him an “excellent” review.

More importantly, however, I think I’m a far better driver today, and I’m not going anywhere near the 85 mark on my speedometer.