Share Your Story
Do you have a traffic safety related story you would like to share? Please take a moment to tell us about your positive or negative experience on the roadways of Virginia. Have you or a loved one been involved in a crash? Are you here today because of your safety belt use? Do you know of a particularly heartwarming or wrenching story that you would like to share?
Click to the right to upload your story and a photograph. Following a review by DRIVE SMART staff, entries will be posted to this page. We are providing the opportunity for you to share your experience so that others might learn from you and, in turn, make positive changes to their driving behaviors.
DRIVE SMART reserves the right to edit all entries for grammatical errors.
Your Stories
Buckle Up. It’s the Coolest Thing You Can Do
Barbara Justis
Onancock, Virginia
My 22 year old son was pronounced dead after 10 hours of medical tests following a single car accident on the night before. He was not wearing his seatbelt. This was not a high-speed crash. If he had been wearing his seatbelt, he would be with us today. He was raised wearing a seatbelt - car seat, booster seat, seatbelt - always!
Then it was too much trouble or not so cool. What’s cool about leaving your family heart broken. A little boy growing up without knowing his daddy.
Tears flowing at every family event where he is missing? Buckle Up. It’s the coolest thing you can do.
Our First Story
Janet Brooking
DRIVE SMART VIRGINIA
Who better to provide the first entry than a DRIVE SMART staffer. We here at DRIVE SMART are tremendous advocates of safe and responsible teen drivers. One of the reasons that this subject matter is so important to me as that I was almost a statistic.
When I was sixteen years old, I gathered up my best girlfriend, my younger brother, and two of his friends and headed out to a varsity football game. I was the oldest teen in the car and, obviously, the driver. We were on a rural winding road that I was somewhat unfamiliar with when a car came around a sharp corner just across the double yellow lines. Due to my inexperience, I over-reacted by jerking the car to the right, throwing my right wheels into a deep ditch. In an effort to stabilize the car, I jerked the wheel to the left, which caused the rear wheels of the car to go into a skid. At this point, we came in and out of the left ditch, traveled back across the road and flipped twice to land in someone’s front yard. At this point, my brother was hanging out the rear window. Had we flipped again, I am sure it would have killed him. Thankfully all of us were fine, with only cuts, scrapes and bruises. The car was totaled. This crash was caused by driver distraction and inexperience and could have been avoided.
Thankfully research has shown that teen distractions (including other teen passengers) should be minimized and laws have been passed to reflect this. And thankfully there has been an increased focus on the appropriate development of the teen driver and there are many helpful programs available.