Just when you thought you’d heard it all, something like this comes along. Alfa Romeo (a manufacturer of fast cars with added prat attraction) along with Marmalade (a company that makes its money insuring young drivers) have teamed up to do some “research” and come to the astounding conclusion that young drivers have accidents because they cannot afford new cars!
First of all, it is not “research”. Not in the slightest. It’s another survey, the sole purpose of which is to create publicity for the two companies involved.
The “research” – in particular, the article reporting it – is so amateurish it defies description. What is the point of reporting what the public thinks, when the facts are staring you right in the face?
Almost half of new young drivers believe they are being forced into less advanced motors – and this is a major contributor to those aged under 24 being involved in more car accidents than any other age group, according to a survey by manufacturer Alfa Romeo and insurer Marmalade.
Absolute bollocks. Young drivers (and anyone else) who have accidents do so because they drive badly. And insurance premiums are high for the age groups having most accidents as a direct result of this.
And young drivers in new cars are no different. Any safety features are only likely to mask the underlying appalling attitude and driving ability.
Some of the results so far are terrifying. In particular, a 66-year old in Eastbourne was found to be unable to read a car number plate from more than 4 metres! That’s less than a fifth the normal required distance. For all practical purposes he was driving whilst completely blind. The story rides on the back of that of 69-year old Wayne Metcalfe, who was jailed for 6 months (suspended for two years) after he killed a motorcyclist when he knocked him off without seeing him.
The guy who couldn’t read a plate beyond 4 metres also ought to be looking at a prison stretch. You don’t just overlook eyesight that poor (after all, the quality of vision within 4 metres is unlikely to be perfect in such a case, and not being able to see your feet properly would tend to register as there being something slightly wrong). In fact, ignoring such obvious problems has to be down either to criminal stupidity… or just the fact that criminal acts don’t bother you.
It’s a tragic story, but the fact that Lutman’s father was a driving instructor is totally irrelevant. That’s the Daily Mail for you, though.
The law in this country really is in a mess when you read the full story. Lutman was the driver, to be sure, but the deceased – Ian Deer, also 19 – appeared to be at least as responsible for what happened. Lutman didn’t want to drive, but was eventually coerced into doing so by Deer. In fact, Deer was messing with the dual controls (dangerous enough by itself) and even pulled Lutman’s arm off the steering wheel just before the crash. He was not wearing a seatbelt, and text messages received by Lutman made it clear that it was Deer’s idea to take the car keys.
Deer’s mother does not blame Lutman for the crash.
Lutman’s whole life is now ruined by a 3 year and 4 month jail sentence (it would have already been seriously damaged by what he had done, and what he never tried to deny responsibility for). I’m not defending him in any way, but far worse offenders from the dregs of society get away with much more lenient sentences. Lutman, on the other hand, was a good student at Leicester University, with a bright future ahead of him.
This made me smile. Not the main story itself, about a learner who passed first time with no faults (well done for that), but the bit at the end where he is quoted:
My lack of a driving licence was holding me back. Now I can move my career to the next level. I’ve already bought a van.
I like the word obtuse as it is applied to people – particularly in the phrase “deliberately obtuse”. It’s generally where someone purposely picks up the wrong meaning for something. Or perhaps they’ll adopt a particular stance in a discussion which might not be commensurate (another good word) with their normal position on the matter (i.e. it’s the exact opposite). However, it is more commonly referred to by the euphemisms “debate”, “discussion”, “opinion”, and “playing devil’s advocate”.
A good example leapt out at me the other day when a new ADI wrote that he found it strange a pupil should still be driven to and from a nursery location by their instructor, even after 6 lessons. What made it worse was that the journey time was ½ hour each way, and lesson duration was 1½ hours at a time. He asked for “opinions” (I said he was new!)
The simple answer is that in a specific case like this, it is hard to say without knowing the pupil involved. However, taking up 60% of the pupil’s paid time driving to and from a “nursery” location is highly questionable even on the first lesson, let alone on the first four.
Of course, all pupils are different. I mentioned in a recent post how a new one of mine had had no experience at all in a car, and yet he had driven 15 miles or more on his first (2 hour) lesson, mostly without any physical intervention from me. In fact, I told him truthfully at the end that he was already looking like someone who’d had between 10-15 hours of lessons. On that very first session I drove about a mile and a half to a quiet location (10 minutes away), but he drove back, and I don’t expect to ever get behind the wheel for him again. I love it when I get people who learn this quickly, and I have to ignore the “deliberately obtuse” people who argue that I’m pushing pupils too hard, or taking risks. I know my job, and I have a high first time pass rate as a result. None of my ex-learners has ever been involved in a serious accident to my knowledge, so no one is going to tell me I should be sitting yapping in a car park, or flipping through dozens of pretty pictures.
I pick up a fair number of pupils who have switched instructors because – in their own words – they “didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere”. A young girl a couple of weeks ago was a prime example of this. She’d had 9 hours of lessons but had only ever driven round her village*. She’d not dealt with a single roundabout, encountered any other vehicle travelling faster than 30mph, or even touched one of the manoeuvres. But less than 5 minutes in it was clear that she was more than capable and we drove from her village to an industrial area in Colwick to begin looking at the turn in the road and bay parking, after which we drove through Stoke Bardolph along the riverbank. She had no problems beyond those you’d expect from someone trying something new. Another recently acquired pupil had done 19 hours, could drive reasonably well, and yet had not covered a single manoeuvre! We’ve now booked his test – even though his last instructor had told him* that he needed “another year of lessons”.
Of the many hundreds of people I’ve taught, I can count on the fingers of one hand those who have required me to drive to a location for them more than once (twice is my maximum ever). However, I’ve lost count of those who have easily managed to drive back home on the first lesson. I think sometimes the learner is far more capable of learning what they need to learn than the instructor in question is of either realising it or teaching it. That would explain why it seems I generally pick up people who learn quickly, whereas others out there always seem to have a surfeit of those who don’t (i.e. they would if they were allowed to).
Another thing is that most learner drivers know if they’re being held back or not. That’s why they jump ship and go elsewhere. They usually know if they can do something. Some ADIs appear incapable of realising this, and become “deliberately obtuse” in order to defend their inability to recognise ability in others. In all honesty, far too many instructors still “teach by numbers”, and it makes me laugh when I hear from a pupil how they spent several lessons “learning to reverse”, when they still haven’t covered any of the manoeuvres. What on earth did these lessons involve? I have visions of them sitting for an hour in the car, bored stiff and wondering what exactly it is they’re paying for, because you can only “practise reversing” for so long before it gets bloody boring. No wonder they go elsewhere.
There are occasional exceptions. I can only remember one and he was an arrogant little sod. He’d been shown how to drive by his brother, and after his first lesson the brother was arguing with me about when he could put in for his test. The thing is he was a terrible driver. He couldn’t steer properly, drove too fast, didn’t see anything in front of him, and didn’t have a clue about any of the manoeuvres (this was when you had to do two of them on your test). On his second lesson I told him we’d try all the manoeuvres without me saying anything and it was utter chaos. At the end I said “do you see what I mean about not being ready for your test yet?” Do you know what his reply was?
I want to put in for it. I’ll be so shit scared on the day I’m bound to get it right!
I didn’t teach him after that.
Let’s summarise things here. Yes, some pupils may well be extremely slow to learn the absolute basics of car control, but they really are in a tiny, tiny minority of the normal population. Taking more than six 1½ hour lessons and still being incapable of driving on main roads could happen, but the vast majority of times it shouldn’t. But even so, using 60% of someone’s paid time the way it was described originally is definitely out of order. Any sensible learner would look for a new instructor immediately after that.
* I suppose I should add “allegedly” to the starred examples. The “deliberately obtuse” ones would argue that you can’t believe anything a pupil tells you. Of course you can’t. They’re all liars.
The story dwells on the fact that the learner had “only” had seven hours of lessons. So what? I started with a new pupil last week who’d never driven before. He’d never even sat in the driver’s seat of a car. Yet on the first lesson he ended up driving by himself for a distance of at least 15 miles. We had the third lesson today (which now totals 5 hours), and we’ve attempted all of the manoeuvres – and the only thing to sort out with those involves practice and polish.
Although it’s been a while since I had one of these, at the other end of the scale you occasionally get people who take two or three times that amount of lessons before they can even negotiate a simple junction, and even then it can still go wrong. They can’t help it, and they aren’t doing it deliberately. They just aren’t natural drivers.
We don’t know anything at all about the learner in the story. No one seems interested in the important facts, or in how that pupil must feel knowing everyone is rubbing their hands over her misfortune. They just want to gloat.
It appears that she hit the gas instead of the brake, which isn’t uncommon. Mine will sometimes do it when they first try a manoeuvre, but I never lose control. My feet hover over the pedals just in case. And it’s the same with steering – I always assume that pupils will do something strange or dramatic until I know them well enough to be sure that they won’t. They sometimes try it, especially when they see a bus or lorry coming towards them, and I even had one dyspraxic who suddenly tried to drive across a pavement next to a straight road, and who couldn’t explain why.
So the only question that seems to crop up here is why the instructor wasn’t ready for it.
However, there is a saying, often attributed to John Bradford, which goes “there but for the grace of God, go I”. In a nutshell, it means that it could happen to anyone – and that means both the learner driver, the instructor, and any other driver in cases such as these.
Circus acts? The big question has to be: who are the real clowns?
This BBC story reveals that Bristol has introduced a “car-free Sunday” scheme, where certain city centre roads are closed to traffic. Bristol Mayor, George Ferguson – trying hard to look casual by not wearing a tie and sporting horrendous green trousers – appears proud of his “Make Sunday Special” initiative.
Apparently, it works in Bogota – a city with one of the worst traffic congestion problems in the known universe. And in Bordeaux – an ancient city which is somewhat closer to the equator, and which has wall-to-wall sunshine most of the year. So it just has to work in Bristol, right?
Instead of cars, Bristol’s streets are being turned over to jugglers, a few more jugglers, acrobats who can juggle… oh, and then some more jugglers. Proving clearly that George Ferguson hasn’t got a bloody clue. Believe me, juggling gets old very fast indeed. Once you’ve seen one dreadlocked hippy juggling, you’ve seen them all, and the idea that the average juggler is going to keep performing for free while you pretend Bristol is the same as Bordeaux is just silly. It isn’t something you want in your way when you’re trying to get to the bloody shops to buy some milk and bread.
As you’d expect, Bristol’s motorists aren’t particularly impressed. And who can blame them.
And frighteningly, the report claims that “other councils” are watching closely.
I have long held the belief that councils are far more interested in their finances and petty one-upmanship against the motorist than they are in serving the people who elected them. For example, I recently reported that in the wake of impending changes to legislation, whereby police will be able to issue penalty charges (PCNs) and licence points to people who demonstrate careless driving, Nottingham City Council (NCC) announced that it is prepared to spend taxpayers’ money sending out a camera car to try and catch more of them in the act. It’s worth pointing out that they already have such a car, and they use it around the City Centre to patrol bus lanes and no stopping areas, though this doesn’t mean that they’d not willingly buy a fleet of the damned things were they to go ahead with this vendetta.
It’s hard to see what benefit this could have to NCC, since they themselves cannot gain financially, nor can they actually issue PCNs. In fact, it would cost an additional fortune for them to report any videoed instances and hope that the police followed it up, and quite frankly I doubt that NCC and the police have quite the same ideas about what constitutes sufficient infringement – particularly if the motorist appeals to the courts. And as I also mentioned in that previous article, NCC continues to completely ignore one of the biggest sources of bad driving – taxis – in order to further penalise the common driver. That’s because taxis are a major revenue stream for the council (i.e. they have to buy licences to operate), whereas motorists aren’t… yet. NCC has no interest in getting bad drivers off the road. If it did, it would target taxis (and all forms of bus) immediately.
Bus lanes are separate problem. I wrote recently about what to do if an emergency vehicle comes up behind and there’s a bus lane in operation alongside you. Any organisation which was staffed by at least one or two normal human beings would explicitly state in all its FAQs that you could drive in the bus lane to allow the emergency vehicle to pass. To be fair to NCC, it actually does say this on its website. However, Nottinghamshire County Council and numerous others around the country are all extremely careful not to say anything about it at all – thus leaving the door open to increase revenue from PCNs if they so choose. Some have absolute zero tolerance policies. And yet having (or not, as the case may be) an explicit statement concerning bus lanes is a matter of immense safety importance, often involving life or death situations. You’d expect it to be Item #1 on the FAQ list, yet these vile vultures carefully avoid addressing it so they can milk money from motorists in order to line their own pockets.
Of course, most of the foregoing might be seen as just a personal opinion. So it was interesting to see this article on the BBC website. Apparently, councils plan to install even more CCTV equipment at black spots in order to milk still more money from their victims.
One example in Basildon tells how the monkeys running the council have turned one particular road into a buses-only route. Buses don’t run on a Sunday, but cars still can’t use it. The idiots in charge reckon that they’d review the times if “the local community supported it”. Like I say: idiots.
Reading Borough Council (RBC) is apparently the worst county for issuing tickets. One clown who got voted into power says:
This allegation that somehow we put in cameras to raise money is nonsense… We put in cameras so that buses… run on time and the bus lanes do what they say.
Complete bollocks. The number of buses held up by cars using 24-hour or in-operation bus lanes can be counted on the fingers of one hand, figuratively speaking. And the difference between what it was like before Fascist-like enforcement and after would be smaller still. The idiot quoted would have us believe that until RBC started enforcing it, everyone drove in bus lanes. They didn’t – and those who did still do.
Bristol City Council (BCC), along with RBC, is seeking to gain extra powers so it can harvest money via other trumped-up infringements.
There is a particular box junction in London with CCTV, and this has snared 29,000 motorists in the year to March 2013. Do they really believe that 29,000 motorists are career criminals, or is it maybe a case that the policing of the junction in question might be a little over zealous?
One motorist who got mugged by the council at this junction put in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request asking for email exchanges within the traffic department responsible to be handed over. What he received makes very interesting reading. There was reference to financial targets, and comments such as:
Another record for us…
The late shift penalty charge notices helped matters so well done everyone…
A worrying start [to the financial period] as penalty charge notices seemed to reduce…
It is obvious that these vultures don’t want safety or congestion improvements. That second one reeks of “teamworking” – trust me, I’ve been there. I know how this will have been briefed to staff. Of course, the pond scum running the councils claim that all this was “office banter” – which is more bollocks. The “well done” comment is clearly from higher up, and the other two are not exactly something the average traffic warden would say.
And if you’re still not convinced, the reporter in question did an experiment where he put up signs on lamp posts warning drivers to obey the box junction rules. This caused a 25% reduction in drivers stopping in it. But of course, that meant a 25% reduction in revenue for the council – so Hammersmith and Fulham told him to remove them.
Yes. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt (an error on my part some years ago). Some councils even have mobile cameras in vans to catch you doing it (or other “road offences”).
You’d think that being caught drink driving would be a fairly simple matter to resolve. You know, some jerk drinks too much and drives erratically, then along comes Mr Plod and confirms he’d had too much. The courts then formally punish the miscreant. Job done.
Andrew Seeley, 32, obviously thinks differently. He was so drunk he didn’t know where he was going (in the news story’s own words). When he noticed he was being followed he tried to drive off at speed. When eventually stopped he was found to be more than 2½ times the legal limit. But then it gets amusing.
Seeley refused a second breath test (probably after realising how far over he was) on the grounds of having a collapsed lung from abusing aerosol gas when he was younger. He refused blood samples on the grounds of having a fear – no, a phobia – of needles. He denied driving under the influence of drink or drugs, smugly believing his wild stories would save him. He claimed that he had swerved across the road to avoid an unknown creature:
It was bigger than a cat. It was living. I can’t say what it was.
It reminds me of an old Marty Feldman sketch, where he’s in a vet’s waiting room with a large basket containing some unseen-but-monstrous creature. He says to a little old lady with a budgie in a cage:
I looked him up in the Cattle-breeder’s Guide – he wasn’t in there; I looked him up in the Standard Book of British Birds – he wasn’t in there either; I finally found him in the Book of Revelations.
The best part is that the Sheriff (this was in Scotland) ignored all that crap and found him guilty of drink driving. He was banned for four years and given 100 hours community service. The only thing the Sheriff said was that he couldn’t be sure if Seeley really did have a phobia about needles and so he didn’t find him guilty of refusing to provide a specimen.
Seeley obviously lives in a different world to normal people.
You have to laugh. Anna Louise Smith, 21, is a student studying nursing in Swansea. As a prank, she decided to move a friend’s car to make it look like it had been stolen.
You need to be a student to appreciate how “funny” this sort of prank is. However, you don’t need to be a student to appreciate how funny it is if the police turn up in the middle of your jolly wheeze, decide that you’re acting suspiciously, and subsequently discover that you’re also twice the legal limit as a result of having been to the annual Summer Ball. If you’re a student – and especially if you’re the student – this, of course, suddenly makes the whole affair distinctly unfunny,
Smith’s defence lawyer reckoned that she’d only moved the car around the corner, and that a ban would be particularly hard on his client. The magistrates ignored that crap and banned Smith from driving for 12 months and fined her over £200.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, at 21, she must only have passed within the last couple of years. I’m assuming that she’ll have to do it all again – with the associated expense.
George Ferguson – trying hard to look casual by not wearing a tie and sporting horrendous green trousers – appears proud of his “Make Sunday Special” initiative.
penalty charges (PCNs) and licence points to people who demonstrate careless driving, Nottingham City Council (NCC) announced that it is prepared to spend taxpayers’ money sending out a camera car to try and catch more of them in the act. It’s worth pointing out that they already have such a car, and they use it around the City Centre to patrol bus lanes and no stopping areas, though this doesn’t mean that they’d not willingly buy a fleet of the damned things were they to go ahead with this vendetta.