Category - ADI

The Boston Standard reports that the borough’s young drivers face “one of the highest risks of being injured in car crashes in the country”.

Let’s just get things straight here. The figures do not mean that your chances of having an accident increase just by moving to Boston – it’s the higher proportion of teenagers brought up there only having a single helix in their DNA that is to blame.

Yet again, the real problem is being shoved under the carpet. The reason Boston teenagers are having more accidents is that they are bigger prats than in other places. Someone needs to be dealing with that – not trying to blame it on statistics that they don’t really understand.

“Experts” are trying to suggest that poor public transport and long distances from home to school are to blame. But this argument is based on totally separate “statistics” designed to dumb things down. It would appear that if you live in Boston, it’s a 3 mile round trip even to go to the toilet, and you need a passport to go to school because you have to move through several international borders!

Let’s do what the Boston Standard didn’t do, and actually read the report, which you can access here.

Instead of adopting the Boston Standard’s selective and scaremongering approach, lets list ALL the factors the report identified.

Analysis has identified a number of common factors present in young driver collisions, including the following:

• They tend to drive older cars with less crash protection
• There are often three or more casualties in their collisions
• Their collisions often occur at night and at weekends
• Their collisions often occur on wet roads
• Their collisions often occur on minor roads in rural areas with a 60mph speed limit
• Their collisions are often single vehicle so involve no other road user
• They often occur on bends, particularly on rural roads
• Their vehicle often skids, and in some cases then overturns
• Their vehicle often leaves the road, and in many cases hits a roadside object or enters a ditch

Summarising, you can say that young drivers drive bangers filled with their mates, and mostly at night (a progression from arseing about on skateboards and BMX bikes outside the chippie). Since they’re usually travelling at speed, their accidents occur on wet roads and bends – particularly on roads where it is possible to put your foot down – which results in the car skidding and overturning, and often hitting objects off the road (i.e. trees and posts).

The Boston Standard appears to have only seen the one about rural roads and taken it out of context with the others.

The report notes:

Nationally, the research found that young drivers who are from rural areas are significantly overrepresented within the collision statistics compared to their urban counterparts.

So, young drivers in rural areas DO have more accidents overall. When you look at the report’s bar chart for the three areas it has identified – urban, town, and rural – you see that there is a progression from the first category up to the third. Basically, in places where you can’t drive fast, you stand less chance of hurting yourself than you do in places where you CAN drive fast. It’s bloody obvious.

The report further discovers that there is no difference between the different areas for drivers 30 and over. Tellingly, it uses the term “mature adults”. Now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty of the cause.

The report then adds:

It would therefore suggest that rural roads themselves are not responsible for the increased collision involvement of rural young drivers.

The Boston Standard and it’s “experts” are talking rubbish, then, when they try to sweep the problem under the rug.

The report continues:

There is very little difference between young and older drivers for the speed limit of the road on which they were involved in collisions.

Quite. It is inappropriate speed that is the issue. Inappropriate for the situation, and inappropriate for the driver’s skills (or lack thereof).

The report says:

The mileage data shows that rural residents have 31% higher annual average mileage than their urban counterparts. For adult drivers, this does not lead to a higher collision risk… Young rural drivers, however, are 37% more likely to be involved in a collision than urban young drivers.

This is just stating the obvious. The longer you’re in the car driving it, the more likely you are to have an accident if you’re already in a higher risk group.

But what shoots all of this out of the water is the risk map included in the report. Some of the most rural areas – and ones with the most winding and out-of-the-way roads – such as ALL of Scotland, and large parts of the northern areas have risk indices that are around the the norm (100). The peaks correspond generally to very specific areas of well-known idiot-country. The lowest indices relate to exclusively urban areas – the report makes that clear,

The report concludes that younger drivers are at risk, particularly on rural roads. That has been known for years. The report also concludes that it isn’t the roads themselves that are the problem. It is specifically younger drivers, for whom the risks increase the more rural their driving areas are. It states clearly:

…this would imply that there is something about rurality and young drivers (through inexperience and/or attitude) that leads to increased collision risk.

THIS IS PRECISELY THE PROBLEM.

It must be obvious that since you cannot create experience out of nothing, then care is needed while it is being acquired. Young drivers simply do not exercise care – they have appalling attitudes on the road. And they are clearly less likely to do so in certain areas – Boston might have come out in the top risk group, but there are plenty of considerably more rural locations which didn’t.

Looking at my own region, I note that Mansfield and Bassetlaw feature well above the norm. And yet Nottingham – which I can assure you has it’s fair share of complete prats – is right down at the bottom (i.e. the good) end. The numbers don’t seem to prove anything when you consider that detail.

This story is a little confusing if you read into it . It says that there is a scheme – The Blue Lamp Trust – running in Basingstoke aimed at improving the driving standards of company car drivers. That’s not a bad thing at all.

But the story’s author says clearly that when he went to take an assessment, the trainer immediately discovered that his driving licence was out of date – it had, in fact, expired the previous May. The article says:

The lesson started badly. A quick inspection of my driving licence revealed it expired in May, something I had been blissfully unaware of.

But then it goes on to report how the author got on on his assessment. It makes no mention of any delay while the licence was updated. The author explains how he subsequently “passed” the assessment. It is clear that the assessment went ahead in spite of the driver having no valid driver’s licence.

It raises a few questions, not least the one about what law allows you to drive on the roads if you don’t have a licence. One that expired almost a year ago is not valid.

Another question is how can someone who hasn’t got one, and who wasn’t aware of the fact his had expired, pass an assessment which by definition would require the person being assessed to know about this and deal with it?

Naturally, that then raises questions about the administration of the scheme (registered as a charity, it appears).