Driving At Night Is Dangerous

Driving at night is incredibly dangerous- especially if you cannot see where you are going. A few years ago, when I was in college, I noticed that I was having difficulty seeing the names of street signs when I would drive home from my night classes. Not really thinking too much about it, I then started to notice that I was also having difficulty judging distances when waiting to make a turn. The cars that approached me looked like little starbursts of light, and I couldn't tell how far or near they were in order to accurately judge when I should turn into traffic, so I would simply wait until there weren't any cars coming before I would go. In addition to this, I was having trouble reading the blackboard in class. It didn't take a genius to figure out that perhaps it was time to get glasses. Once I did finally get glasses, my vision was back to where it should have been, although I shudder to think about what may have happened had I not taken action.

Recently, my mother relayed a story to me about how she was at work one night and was going to walk across a little side street to get a bite to eat from the restaurant that was located there. As she was preparing to cross the street, the first thing that caught her eye was a single shoe belonging to a woman. She then looked up and was shocked to discover that there was a crowd beginning to gather around what looked like a young woman laying in the street. My mom, remembering that one of her fellow employees had just walked out the door not even

five minutes before her, rushed over to see what was going on. Sure enough, there was my mother's co-worker laying on the ground in the middle of the road going in and out of consciousness. My mother was able to identify her to the crowd of people gathering and then rushed back inside the store to get the manager.

Later on, it was found out that my mother's co-worker was actually en route to the same sandwich shoppe that my mother was originally heading to when an elderly woman rounded the corner very fast and struck her. The impact of the car hitting her actually knocked her out of her shoes. Thankfully, she didn't really sustain any serious injuries and was released from the hospital later that night. However, the fact remains that when it is dark outside, whether you are the driver or the pedestrian, you have to be so careful because things aren't illuminated quite as well as they normally would be under normal lighting circumstances. This is why you often see dead deer laying across highways and back roads. It's often because drivers cannot see them until it is too late.

Older drivers' reflexes typically aren't as sharp as they were when they were younger, so you have to be wary when sharing the road with them. The same thing applies to younger drivers who may not have yet developed the proper driving techniques to keep them out of trouble.