Category - World

This is a very, very old article.

The same story is covered in the Independent and The Irish Times.

The 61-year old plasterer, Raymond Hefferman, has failed 10 tests since 2004. The Irish system means he can still drive on a provisional licence.

Hefferman took his latest result to a district court in an attempt to have the result reversed. His examiner/instructor on test recorded 26 faults, which included driving straight through a STOP sign and through a mini-roundabout.

He also failed to signal, ignored instructions, over-revved, and didn’t check around him properly (his observations were “particularly poor”, said the examiner).

Apparently, after being told where to go on the mini-roundabout, Hefferman drove straight over it and then said:

So where is this mini roundabout?

His defence seemed to rest solely on the fact that he has been driving for 44 years (I’ve mentioned previously how lax the Irish system used to be – and yet Irish drivers can come over to the UK or any other EU territory and drive without hindrance).

This was his seventh appeal against a result! He said:

this injustice had gone on long enough.

He has been blacklisted by driving testers.

The Judge, Tim Lucey, said:

If one Grade 3 fault is enough to fail, then five is plenty. As far as I’m concerned, the test was properly conducted.

Way to go, Judge. We need people like you over here.

This one is from California. Kaitlyn Dunaway, 18, tried to text while she was driving. She ploughed into a mother and toddler, killing the child and seriously injuring the mother. Echoes of the Keisha Bianca Wall case we had here recently.

The article says that Dunaway is the first known person in California to be charged with causing death by texting and driving. Surprisingly, the maximum prison term she is looking at is just one year in a county jail. She admits full responsibility.

Aside from the obvious “rot in hell” sentiments you’d expect from certain quarters of the public, what also surprises me is the belief of the reporter that:

I don’t see what would be accomplished by locking away this young woman for years on end. She made a terrible mistake that she will have to live with every day for the rest of her life.

Let me just say again that the MAXIMUM sentence is ONE YEAR in a county jail. I’m not quite sure where the reporter gets the higly emotive “years on end” from.

But my biggest question is: why is it different for her?

Would it matter if it were a man? The reporter, Tammerlin Drummond, is a woman – as is the accused. You could easily apply the “I don’t see what would be accomplished…” line to anyone and any crime. Does it really matter that it is a woman who is involved?

I suspect that to some people, it does.

The article goes on to mention “[scaring] sense into people”. I commented on that in the previous story. We need to wake up to the fact that the only way of scaring sense into people is to enforce serious penalties on those who transgress, not to mollycoddle them with tragedies, however poignant they might be.

Sad stories do not work.

America is a million miles behind the UK on this, and we’re pretty crap on enforcing it ourselves. And yet enforcement is so easy. Every day I glance in my rearview mirror and see people who are obviously texting (or doing something that is equally distracting down by their groins). Surely the police could do this in unmarked cars?

This one came through in the newsfeeds this morning. It’s a terrible tragedy – two 18-year olds were killed in a motor crash in North Carolina, USA.

However, consider the comment:

Police estimated that the car involved in Monday’s crash on Overlook Road in South Asheville was traveling at 65-70 mph in a 35 mph zone.

We’ve tried shock tactics in the UK, with graphic videos on YouTube, and various talks and lectures. But does it change the way people behave?

The problem is that time heals all wounds – ALL wounds. So although a tragedy like this gets everyone saying “Oh, I’ve learned my lesson”, what they really mean is that they have learned the lesson until the memory fades, then their regular behaviour resurfaces. And those not connected with the event just carry on regardless anyway.

Whenever something like this happens, someone is bound to trot out the old “immortal” card, and suggest that teenagers think that they’re immortal or something. Well, no offence, but that is bloody stupid. They don’t think they’re immortal at all. They just haven’t considered anything beyond showing off and breaking rules.

And stop keep saying it is just teens. It isn’t. This sort of arrogance, ignorance, and stupidity can manifest itself in anyone of any age. The only teen-specific thing is experience. They’re not as brilliant as they’d like to think, because driving skill – even enough to avoid a major accident whilst breaking the law – only comes with experience.

If you look at the “Timeline of tragedy” box in the link I gave above, the causes of fatal crashes in the same area over the last three years involving teenagers include:

• 15-year old driving his father’s truck on a learner permit
• 16-year old doing 65mph in a 35mph zone on a bend
• 16-year old doing 50mph in a 40mph zone without a seatbelt
• 16-year old reading a text and doing 52mph in a 45mph zone
• 18-year old passenger without a seatbelt
• 16-year old driver and 14-year old passenger doing 85mph
• 18-year old passenger – 20-year old driver was doing 70mph in a 45mph zone
• 16-year old passenger – 17-year old driver was doing 60mph and both had been drinking

And this is just a small area of the world. The same thing is happening every day, everywhere.

The article concludes with this:

Why teens crash

Per mile driven, teen drivers are four times more likely than adult drivers to crash. Factors that contribute to teen crashes and injuries include:

• Driver inexperience: Crash rates are highest during the first year a teen has a license.
• Driving with teen passengers: Crash risk goes up when teens drive with other teens in the car. The risk increases with each additional passenger.
• Nighttime driving: For all ages, fatal crashes are more likely to occur at night, but the risk is highest for teens.
• Not wearing seat belts: Compared with other age groups, teens have the lowest rate of seat belt use.
• Distracted driving: Distractions — such as talking or texting on cell phones, eating, or playing with the radio — increase teen drivers’ risk of being in a crash.

How long will it be before someone extracts the obvious best solution to the problem from all this?

Distracted driving is big news in America at the moment. Laws are being passed in almost every state to make the use of mobile phones and especially sending text messages illegal whilst driving.

Occasionally, some state or other is unfortunate to have a complete dickhead on local government, and the laws are prevented from coming into force for some unbelievably crass reason.

See if you can spot the latest dickhead in this sentence:

AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry vetoed legislation Friday that would have banned texting while driving because he views it as “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.”

Incredible, isn’t it? This imbecile believes that texting while driving is OK, because stopping it is government micromanagement. He stopped short of describing texting whilst driving as every American’s constitutional right, although that’s obviously what he was getting at.

Interesting story in the Saarbrücker Zeitung, reporting that new drivers will have to have a feedback session with a driving instructor three months after gaining their licences.

The story reports:

The Transport Ministry is drawing up the plans following the example of Austria where the sessions serve to remind beginning drivers of what they are supposed to do and to rid them of any bad habits they might be developing.

Austria? That made my ears prick up, for some reason. They were quite involved in the original GDE Matrix report. So was Germany, for that matter.

“Austria has achieved good success with the post-test evaluation teaching concept,” Gero Storjohann, Christian Democratic Union transport expert told the paper.

And evaluation of this sort is typical of what the GDE Matrix/coaching thing lives for.

The problem as I see it is that the Germans appear to be assuming that Austria’s 30% lower death rate among young drivers is purely down to this assessment. That, of course, is complete nonsense.

I wonder if this is how the EU is going to slip coaching into the driver training systems of the various member states?

As you go through life, there are some things which are so certain that you can set your watch by them. For example, if you fall out of the 2nd floor window of your house, you get hurt. If you put your hand in a Flymo while it’s plugged in, you can forget learning to play the piano. And if you have too many driving instructors, they’ll all start moaning that there isn’t enough work to go around and the overall quality of instruction will go down.

Someone should explain that to the Irish, as this story makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, so certain is the outcome in a year or two’s time.

A driving school is cynically capitalising on the new Irish driving test by offering “scholarships” to unemployed people. In other words, it is trying to increase its own business by adding more ADIs to the pool. It claims it is to “take people off the dole queue”.

Well, in order to significantly reduce the dole queue it would have to create a lot of ADIs. If it only does a handful, then the effect on the dole queue is negligible. Then, of course, there is the age old issue of whether just anyone can be a good ADI (and Ireland has only just got around to trying to sort its seriously flawed driver training system as it is). In other words, if someone is “unemployed”, are they necessarily automatically “employable” in a job like this?