Senior Katelyn Wolf was driving just like any other day when her car was flipped over. Someone had run a light and hit her on the side at the intersection of Routes 1 and 543, causing her car to roll over.

“I had a mild concussion, a severely pulled Achilles [tendon], and then a bunch of scratches and bruises from the glass,” Wolf said.

Wolf was only in the hospital for a couple of hours, but said that the entire experience was “scary” and “upsetting because I had to go without a car and I couldn’t walk for a while.”

“Ever since my car rolled over, I make sure I drive the speed limit and turn on my blinkers,” Wolf said.

Sadly, she doesn’t think the rest of her senior class feels the same way.

“I know the kids in my class, and they seem like bad drivers and speeders, because they cut people off. They don’t know how to drive,” Wolf said. “I feel like no one really cares about driving. They are just like ‘ok, whatever, I just have to get there.’ I know I take driving a lot more seriously.”

Accidents

Accidents are not isolated to one person in the class of 2013. Senior Hannah Jacques had a less serious but still scary encounter with another vehicle.

“I was driving up a hill and my car was pretty old. When I got to the top, the hill went down and there was a line of cars on the other side, and I rear ended the person in front of me. I ended up getting out of my car and the lady I hit was really nice and we waited for my parents to come,” Jacques said.

Her driving style hasn’t changed since, but she looks to minimize distractions when she’s driving.

“I’m really observant when I’m driving now. I think I drive now like how I drove when I took my test, which was very cautiously,” Jacques said.

Senior Annie Morris has been in two major accidents, only one of which was her fault.

“The first one was about three weeks after getting my license. I rear-ended someone that stopped suddenly in front of me because a school bus in the next lane was stopping to pick up a student. The second accident was about a year ago when I was making a left hand turn coming out of a stop when another car hit me on the driver’s side,” Morris said.

Since her accidents, Morris has tried to be more careful with her driving habits. By not texting and driving or trying to multitask, she hopes to be a better driver.

According to Morris, the most important part of driving is “paying attention and being aware of your own habits, as well as what other cars are doing around you.”

According to keepthedrive.com, a program that is “led by teens across the country who want to make a difference” by encouraging safe driving and acts as a tool for young drivers, teen crashes occur four times more often than other crashes. 3,115 teens died in car crashes in 2012, and about 450,000 teens were injured.

Speeding and Tickets

Morris has stayed on the good side of the law, in that she has never received a ticket. She did once get pulled over for speeding coming up the hill towards Bel Air after leaving JC, but she only received a warning. Neither Wolf nor Jacques have ever received a ticket. Other seniors haven’t been so lucky.

Senior Brian Tenerowicz received a ticket on a long drive to North Carolina with his mom.

“I had driven all day, so I was really tired. I just wanted to get there as fast as possible and I really wasn’t paying attention to how fast I was going, and I saw the lights behind me and I was like, ‘this isn’t good,’” Tenerowicz said.

In general, Tenerowicz believes the key to driving safely is “driving the speed limit,” but thinks this isn’t the case all the time.

“Sometimes driving the speed limit probably isn’t the best thing to do, like on the highway. If you’re going just 65 [mph], you’re going to get passed by a lot of people, and you could cause a hazard to yourself, because some people will be going faster than you.

It could cause an accident if they are not paying attention. Sometimes it’s better, safer, to go a little bit faster than the speed limit,” he said.

Overall, Tenerowicz thinks he’s a safe driver even if he does speed from time to time, because he always focuses on the road. He never looks at his phone and “always has two hands on the wheel and [is] aware of what’s going on in front of [him].”

Senior Nick Druelinger claims to have the most tickets in the senior classwith four or five, and another one he wasn’t convicted of.

“I have been working on cars all my life, and I like to make them perform. I like to make them perform at their full potential,” Druelinger said.

Druelinger said he has seriously been working on cars since the age of 15, and now works with cars every day. He likes to try to improve the quality of a part or how the car, as a whole, works by performing maintenance and cleaning it.

His first ticket was when he was caught street racing on Route 40. Not wanting to run from the cops, he pulled over. He received six points on his license and a $400 fine, but in the end, was not able to be convicted because they couldn’t prove he had been racing.

Another ticket Druelinger received was for driving 60 mph in a 30 mph zone and spinning wheels.

“I’m safe when I want to be safe. I drive normal when I’m just driving, trying to get from point A to point B … [But when] I do something new to my car, I want to try it out,” he said.

Looking back, he wants students “not to make the dumb decisions I made.” “Treat [driving] as a privilege more than a right,” Druelinger said.

Drivers Ed and Driving Tests

Druelinger passed both his permit and driving test on the first try. Due to his background with cars, he wasn’t nervous. He also claims Drivers Ed was a “terrible experience.”

“I gained absolutely no knowledge from that,” he said.

Tenerowicz passed his permit and license test on his first tries. For the permit test, he said taking the practice tests online helped him a lot.

For the portion of the test that is on the road, “[the MVA employee] said if I went five [mph] over once I’d get a warning, if I went five over twice I’d fail, so to stay safe I stayed five under the entire time,” he said.

His biggest advice is to practice parking in the car that you’ll drive on the test because the Drivers Ed instructors show you how to parallel park in their car, but not the one you take. Otherwise, he found Drivers Ed was a “waste.”

“I knew 95 percent of what they told me. But if you don’t know much about driving cars, it’s very helpful… I think a lot of people stress about passing, and in reality, it’s not as bad as people think it is,” Tenerowicz said.

Wolf, on the other hand, felt some parts of Drivers Ed were necessary, but did recognize that a lot of parts were “common sense.” She too passed her permit test the first time, but it took her two tries for her license.

“That was really stressful. I didn’t get it the first time. The second time I got it though, and that was exciting, because I passed and I could drive myself anywhere without asking my parents to take me places,” she said.

The freedom still remains her favorite part, but her least favorite part is the other drivers’ inability to drive safely. Wolf wants future and current drivers to “take [driving] seriously, because you have a weapon that could kill someone.”

Hope Kelly and Meredith Haggerty are are In-Depth Editors for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.