You can read the latest edition of Despatch here. In this issue they cover proposed changes to the route to becoming an ADI, the DSA/VOAS merger, a change to the situation regarding disabled ADIs, a report on a clampdown on illegal instructors, and the usual roundup of other stuff.
I still wish that Despatch was about 10 pages longer – the articles really need more space. Then again, the attention span of 21st century readers probably wouldn’t be able to cope.
Nicely following on from the tragedy in that last story, several driving schools have reportedly “created” special modules for their instructors to use when teaching learners how to handle cyclists. You can read more in ADI News but you’ll have to subscribe to the magazine itself (which is very worthwhile).
But it makes me smile. If instructors need “special” modules for dealing with cyclists, you have to wonder what the hell they’ve been teaching up until now. And is anyone naive enough to believe that the tragedy reported wouldn’t have happened if learner drivers were trained differently? No one ever seems to question deficiencies in the training that cyclists receive (i.e. virtually none in most cases).
No learner I have ever taken on has been under the impression that there is an open season on cyclists, or that it’s OK to run over one. In fact, the biggest problem by far is that they initially try to give them so much room that they don’t take account of oncoming vehicles or parked cars on the other side of the road. Beyond that, the task is to get them to try and anticipate and not try to barge through narrow gaps – which applies when dealing with any other road user, and not just cyclists.
The Highway Code says of the matter:
211
It is often difficult to see motorcyclists and cyclists, especially when they are coming up from behind, coming out of junctions, at roundabouts, overtaking you or filtering through traffic. Always look out for them before you emerge from a junction; they could be approaching faster than you think. When turning right across a line of slow-moving or stationary traffic, look out for cyclists or motorcyclists on the inside of the traffic you are crossing. Be especially careful when turning, and when changing direction or lane. Be sure to check mirrors and blind spots carefully.
212
When passing motorcyclists and cyclists, give them plenty of room (see Rules 162 to 167). If they look over their shoulder it could mean that they intend to pull out, turn right or change direction. Give them time and space to do so.
213
Motorcyclists and cyclists may suddenly need to avoid uneven road surfaces and obstacles such as drain covers or oily, wet or icy patches on the road. Give them plenty of room and pay particular attention to any sudden change of direction they may have to make.
163
[Partial quotation]
- give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car
When on lessons, learners will inevitably encounter cyclists in real situations, and extremely common questions include:
You don’t need to be a genius to work out the answer to these, and I always answer completely truthfully. No politically correct claptrap to try and make the cyclist in question come out as a saint – just the plain truth. I’ve ridden with them before, and the reasons they ride on the road instead of the cycle path include:
Indeed, the group I rode with openly admitted that it deliberately held up cars on country lanes by riding two abreast – particularly if the car sounded its horn at them – and I am certain that this group wasn’t unique. As far as jumping red lights goes (I’ve seen three do it today – two Spandex Boys, and one gorilla on a mountain bike) they simply don’t know, don’t care, and probably both. I also point out to learners that someone who shoots a red light on a bike (or who hops on to the pavement at the last minute to use the footpath) is quite likely to be as blasé about the whole business when they’re in a car.
It seems that both The AA (including BSM) and RED have introduced these special “modules. The AA’s news release is here. RED is unfortunately on Facebook, which means you’ll not be able to find anything meaningful (well, maybe if you’re quick, but not if you try the link after a few days), but I will tell you that at this moment in time RED is claiming that it:
…asked over 1,000 cyclists and 98% feel more should be done to educate new drivers on the importance of cyclist safety.
I just have to put my head in my hands and wonder what the world is coming to with stuff like that. It’s like asking a thousand petty criminals if they think they should be let out of prison early, and somehow thinking that they must have a point if 98% of them say yes. What do RED expect cyclists to say? No?
The problem is that the sudden newsworthiness of the subject is partially linked to one particular incident, which is a prime example of the lowest intelligence in human society being able to get a driving licence. Emma Way tweeted the following after she knocked one off:
Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier – I have right of way he doesn’t even pay road tax! #bloodycyclists
Let’s just get our facts straight here – it isn’t the phrase “bloody cyclists” which is the problem (that was in the hash tag anyway), but the fact she nearly killed one in a road traffic accident and doesn’t seem to have reported it or stopped at the scene, or even to have been concerned, but then showed off about it. It was her childish trust in Twitter, and her overall outlook on life those few words convey which was her downfall. You can read more on that link above – she’s going to get in serious trouble, and it serves her right if the accusations are true – though the rest of the article is rabidly pro-cyclist. If Emma Way is at one complete extreme of the spectrum*, the authors of the article are at the opposite extreme. And in both cases, I mean “extreme”. Absolutely as far as it is possible to go.
Because let’s not lose sight of the fact that many cyclists ARE a bloody nuisance on the roads, especially with so many of them thinking that they’re Bradley Wiggins since last summer – and it is deficiencies in them, perhaps typified by the rabid rhetoric in parts of the article above (particularly the comments below it – some of those people don’t seem to realise that what they’re saying is as bad as what Emma Way said), which are at the root of the problem. Not the motorist.
* At the moment, there is some dispute over what actually happened. Emma Way might have all the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn as far as her tweet and underlying attitude goes (not to mention some of the other things she has apparently said and done, according to her Facebook pages), but her version of events does have a certain plausible ring about it. And the cyclist involved, Toby Hockley, refused to talk to the BBC any further.
Update: Emma Way has pleaded not guilty to three charges related to the incident. The case is to go to trial in November.
Update: Emma Way was found guilty of two of the three charges – failing to stop, and failing to report an accident. She was acquitted of driving without due care and attention. The rapid pro-cycling lobby will be unhappy about this, I guess. Mind you, some of them would appear to have found a creative way of dealing with it.
I just saw this on the BBC news website. It reports that a 17-year old female cyclist (later reports, and the BBC’s updated one, say that she was 20) riding one of those hired “Boris bikes” has been knocked off by a lorry and killed.
London is one of the busiest cities in the world, and has some of the most congested roads in the world. Something like this is always highly likely when you add bikes to the mix. To make matters worse, if you consider what it says on that Wikipedia page, 49% of those hiring Boris Bikes only took up riding in London because of the facility. Since the company has 8,000 bicycles, that means an extra 4,000 bike riders are out on London’s streets who wouldn’t have been otherwise.
Furthermore, the Boris Bikes are ridden on “Boris Routes” – dedicated lanes, often painted blue. Just take a look at the picture on the left to imagine the potential risks (you’ll have to imagine the tens of thousands of cars and lorries that would otherwise be on the road at peak times on weekdays – the picture is strangely devoid of them, though the length of the cyclists’ shadows and the greenery suggests this was taken very late or very early in the day, and I would guess at a weekend).
The circumstances of the accident are not known. Later reports say it happened on Friday evening at around 6.30pm, which is right in the middle of London’s Friday night rush hour, and one with a forecast super-hot summer weekend ahead of it. Obviously, it is a huge tragedy.
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: roads are primarily intended for motor vehicles, not bicycles. Creating a false belief that it is otherwise – either through reckless bike hire or the continual green/political pro-bike lobbying – just increases the chances of something like this happening.
Everyone is eager to point out that this is the first fatality involving a hire bike since the scheme began in 2010. However, the BBC article clearly states that Transport for London is anxious to “further reduce” collisions involving cyclists all over London. Or in other words, cyclists having accidents (or very near misses) is not at all uncommon. Other reports mention two cyclists being killed on the same route in 2011 – though they weren’t on Boris Bikes, hence the TfL comments.
I’ve mentioned oxymorons before, so seeing the phrase “personality test” in the same sentence as “Scottish” did initially make me do a double take.
The article itself is even more amusing. Apparently, Edinburgh tram drivers will have to take a personality test to identify “risk takers” and weed them out. Reading between the lines (no pun), you can only conclude that Edinburgh’s current crop of drivers are wont to put their foot down, start doing doughnuts, and basically drive to places that are different to where the tracks are supposed to take them.
Lothian Buses (who operate the trams) refused to comment. I’ll bet they did. And the reason for that is because only someone who works for the council would be able to say the following line with a straight face – and probably even believe it:
[The recruitment process to] build an enthusiastic and skilled team to operate the service is progressing well.
He said the tests were standard across the rail industry and “considered good practice”, adding: “It ensures we have safe and competent people driving Edinburgh’s trams.”
Please don’t vomit all over your keyboard, people. This is what modern business deals with – and the bigger the business the worse the crap is that they spout. Councils simply take it to the next cringe level and beyond.
Don’t think that it is cost-effective, either. They’ve got to employ bouncers to keep people off the trams while the tests are being conducted (so they’re not written tests – they’re based on observation). I have a feeling that the source may have got its wires crossed here (or written its story poorly) and be talking about a separate kind of testing (i.e. of the carriage, not the driver), because for some unexplained reason (I guess you’d know if you were a tram driver), further additional staff are to be employed, tasked with:
…sitting in on test runs through the city centre as trams stop at each of the 16 stations and open their doors to ensure the mechanisms are working correctly.
You couldn’t make it up. Why make something so simple so complicated? The answer, unfortunately, is contained in the word “council” which – by definition – means using 10 or more people where one would suffice.
USA Today is America’s version of The Sun (but without Page 3). This article from it came in via the newsfeeds, and it deals with the type of car parents ought to consider allowing their kids to drive.
The teens often wanted to drive their mother’s far sportier Hyundai Tiburon, but the couple knew that would be a mistake. It was hardly a sports car, but Ulczycki knew the car’s sporty styling would bring out the cowboy in them, even without a high-powered engine.
“Big, slow and ugly.” That’s what parents should keep in mind when considering what car to give or buy a new teen driver, says Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The article then confuses the issue enormously by rattling on about “safety features” on newer cars – much the same as our wishy-washy, “don’t-have-an-opinion” journalists do, instead of working with the facts. But it comes back on track at the end:
These days, it’s almost impossible to buy a car that doesn’t have at least 200 horsepower, even a plain old midsize sedan. That makes it hard to set a horsepower limit for a teen’s car. But experts warn to at least stay away from high-performance models that can bring out the worst in drivers.
“Parents have to realize the kind of car you’re driving tends to elicit certain driving behavior,” says Lund. “If it can go faster, it tends to be driven faster.”
Yes! If it can, it will – and if they can, they will! British parents who allow their kids to drive modded cars should bear this in mind. Because what it looks like and what it sounds like is going to have a lot to do with what it’s driven like.
Regular readers will know that the idea of giving driving lessons to 11-year olds isn’t new. I first caught wind of it last year, and it has been repeated since. It goes back to at least February 2012.
So it was interesting to hear of a “pioneering” (maybe that’s a bad misspelling of “plagiarised”) and “revolutionary” scheme in This Is Bath which teaches… 11-year olds to drive. Maybe someone should explain to This Is Bath hacks what “pioneering” and “revolutionary” actually mean, because they obviously don’t know.
By teaching safe driving at a younger age, this revolutionary programme has the potential to save hundreds of lives each year.
Complete bollocks. Unless it can turn every child in the country into a law-abiding citizen who never goes on to commit a crime for the rest of their lives, it will have no effect on casualty rates at all. That’s because the main cause of accidents among young drivers is attitude. Yes, skill levels are also involved, but in an extremely complex way.
The older people are, the less likely they are to have an accident – and remember that not all new drivers are 17-years old. You get loads of 20- and 30-somethings, and yet 17-25 year olds dominate the accident statistics by a huge margin. That’s largely because the brain doesn’t mature until around 25-years old, and the younger someone is, the less mature the brain is.
It should be obvious that most 11-year olds don’t remember important things they were taught back then when they reach 17. So driving lessons at that age can only ever have any sort of benefit if they are continued regularly – just like music lessons. But someone who spends their entire childhood learning to play the violin can still turn into a little psychopath when behind the wheel of a car at age 17. Still, at least they’ll be a psychopath who can play violin.
And that’s my point: they behave how they want to behave. The 17-year old who took kiddie-lessons when he was 11 will still behave like a prat – he’ll just be a prat who could behave differently if it suited him. And don’t forget that those lessons for 11-year olds aren’t cheap. They go for about £60 an hour, so doing one hour a week for the period 11-17 years will set someone back £15,000!
Remember that these courses are run by businesses, not a charities. Being able to charge £60 an hour from wealthy (but not very bright) parents is a brilliant sales scheme, but that’s all.
One section in this humorous story from Florida caught my attention:
Florida’s requirement that we drive anywhere we want to go is also why we have so many elderly drivers on the roads doing 25 in a 45 mph zone with one blinker on, even though they can be a danger to every other motorist or jaywalking pedestrian. It also explains a phenomenon I have sometimes heard referred to as “Sudden Elderly Acceleration Syndrome.” (Incidents of SEAS got so bad last year the Postal Service put out a PSA asking Floridians to please stop ramming into their post offices.)
As of last year, Florida had 455 licensed drivers who were 100 or older. Between the ages of 91 and 100, there are 65,000. Maybe perhaps possibly it couuuuuld be that some of these folks shouldn’t be driving anymore—but if you take away their car keys, they will be stranded as surely as if they’d been dropped on an Alaskan ice floe.
And I thought WE had it bad. Can you imagine that? There are 65,000 people who are 91-years old or more driving around!
More “opinion masquerading as “research”, this time from Be Wiser Insurance. They’ve discovered that many parents don’t feel their little darlings are properly equipped to drive when they pass their tests, with over 60% saying they were especially worried about them going on motorways.
Look. It would be great if we could take them on motorways during lessons, but that is not where they have their accidents.
The favoured location for this is on a country lane, on a bend, at night. More importantly, the correct procedure when at the location is to have a car full of mates screaming and shouting, a full stock of freshly-bought McDonalds food, and to be in the middle of a “bad testosterone” day, thus forcing you to show off how far away from maturity you really are. Oh, and all this must happen in a pratmobile – most likely part-financed by mummy and daddy – decked out to scream “I go faaaaast” from every angle.
To be fair, lesser worries are also given in the same story, such as driving at night, driving in town centres, and being distracted. But no further detail is given. The main focus is that motorways comment.
Be Wiser is either wholly irresponsible – or just very bad at interpreting and reporting important data correctly – for following the comment up with:
And the statistics appear to back up the worries of parents as drivers aged between 18-25 years are the group mostly likely to be involved in an accident according to Government figures.
YES! ON COUNTRY LANES, AT NIGHT, ON A BEND… NOT ON MOTORWAYS! Be Wiser has missed a trick by not expanding on the actual problems that it must – as an insurer – know about and which are the real causes of accidents. Apart from country lanes, other important factors include texting, showing off, driving and accelerating far too quickly then braking far too harshly, not knowing where you are going and changing direction at the last minute, not knowing the rules of the Highway Code (or not caring), and so on. All related to attitude, by the way. Motorways don’t even make the top ten.
This Is Guernsey reports that elderly drivers don’t think they should be retested. And that comes from an Age Concern group. The entire premise is based on the comment:
Many spoken to felt they were very capable of driving and would be housebound if they did not have a licence.
Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?
This Is Guernsey must have an absolutely tiny circulation, and yet requires a subscription in order to read stories in full. At nearly £2 per copy it is horrendously overpriced. So we’ll just have to go with the above quote as being the sum total of the story. After all, apart from a load more old people saying it’s “unfair” and “discriminatory”, it’s hard to imagine anything that gives the claim any greater substance.
It’s a simple fact that a driving licence isn’t something you get free when you reach 65 along with a bus pass and pension. It’s something that should be taken away at the first signs of health issues likely to impair driving ability, and any form of dementia should immediately be notifiable with mandatory surrendering of the licence. And while we’re on the subject, similar checks should be carried out before anyone is allowed to ride a mobility scooter. If you’re unfit to hold a driving licence there’s almost no way you’re going to be fit to ride one of those things.
I mention mobility scooters because I was out on a lesson last night and this old guy was riding one of them in the road. My pupil asked if they were allowed to do that, and I explained the law (or lack of), and how these scooter riders are often not even aware of what they should and shouldn’t do. Even if they are, they simply don’t care (being old gives you special rights, doesn’t it?) What made this case especially noteworthy was the fact that this particular comedian was carrying a heavy 8 foot metal post with large square platforms either end. If it had fallen on a child (or anyone, come to that) it could easily have killed them, and if it had fallen into the road it could have caused a nasty accident with a lot of damage. His ability to control the scooter was obviously massively impaired as he had it balanced upright between his legs. Anyone doing that with a car or motorcycle would have been on Road Wars in 10 seconds flat, with 3 shiny new points on their licence.
It’s frightening to think that this clown could still have had a drivers licence and a car for all anyone knew.
An Audi driver was driving whilst twice the legal limit. William Watson, 27, drove into a hedge and wrote off his car, ran away from the scene of the accident, then evaded arrest when he was spotted by police a short time later. He was also reported for a separate offence a few days earlier of texting while driving, having been seen doing so by a police officer.
The funny part was his defence lawyer’s plea in mitigation:
[Watson] was held in high regard by those who knew him and had behaved in a way which was out of character.
I must say that he chose a bloody good way to behave “out of character”. Most people would have just picked one of the things he did, but Watson went for all three.
It occurred to me that defence lawyers would be better off not bothering trying to provide mitigating circumstances anymore. For a start off, if someone is guilty as hell the sob stories just make them look even more foolish as the courts totally ignore any pleas for leniency. The only realistic chance you’ve got of getting off is if you’re pregnant (or if you claim that post-natal depression made you do it). And let’s be honest, men can’t really pull that stunt.