I’ll admit it: I should have failed my driving exam.

I went 15 mph over the limit in a school zone and didn’t stop at a stop sign as long as I should have. Yet I passed the exam and apparently did a better job than someone else my mother witnessed taking the exam that day.

Apparently, this guy almost had a head-on collision with a truck before even leaving the parking lot where the exam starts. He passed too.

Full disclosure: I live in New Jersey. We know we don’t drive well.

If you have ever been on the New Jersey Turnpike, you know that we see speed limits as speed minimums, lane markers are just advisory and turn signals are completely optional. Don’t even try driving on the Garden State Parkway.

But now that I drive in Binghamton, I have to wonder whether bad driving is really just a New Jersey problem. People up here really don’t seem to drive any better.

We are quick to stereotype bad drivers. Asians, women and old people are all lumped into the ‘can’t drive’ group. Many people jump to the conclusion that anyone who cuts you off must be an old Korean woman from Jersey.

But how often do we evaluate our own driving? Most people never want to hear that they don’t drive well.

We make up excuses for our driving style. We blame the other drivers. Or we blame the design of the road. We never blame ourselves. And perhaps that is the problem.

After all, we are young college students who tend to engage in rather destructive behavior on a regular basis. We smoke, we drink, we party, we procrastinate and, whether we want to admit it or not, we succumb to peer pressure. Isn’t it possible that the same attitude carries over into our driving?

We speed because we think that speeding isn’t dangerous. We race our friends because it’s fun. We text while driving because we like to multitask. When we’re driving, we don’t think about anyone else on the road.

They’re the other people. The people getting in the way of our fun. The people making us late. They’re the people who don’t know how to drive.

But ultimately, driving is probably the most dangerous thing that we do on a daily basis. We have to be alert to our surroundings. We are putting our lives on the line every time we get in a car. We don’t know what might happen.

We can’t let our normal attitude toward life dominate us while in the driver’s seat. We have to think about the future. Do you really want to have to take time off from classes if you get into an accident? Can you really afford a $400 speeding ticket? Can you afford the increase in insurance premiums that comes with a ticket or an accident?

Before blaming others, we have to think about the consequences of our own actions. Perhaps if everyone did this, driving and life in general would be safer.

Of course my behavior isn’t destructive, though, and clearly I am the only good driver in New Jersey.