According to HeraldScotland, young drivers could face curbs on late-night driving, post-test training, and have to drive cars fitted with monitoring equipment if proposals to cut deaths on Scottish roads come to anything.
That’s the good part. The bad part is that everyone else would have to pay for it via an insurance premium.
Apparently, Scotland has seen over 30 deaths of people between the ages of 17 and 25 every year between 2005 and 2009, and they represent more than a third of all deaths.
The report says that in the UK as a whole, around half of accidents involving young people occur at night compared to 35% for older drivers. Personally, I’m not convinced that this is a particularly large difference – though it IS significant when you start talking about deaths.
The report adds that young drivers are most at risk between 4pm and midnight weekdays, and midnight to 2am at weekends. From where I’m sitting, it looks like someone has decided that making them all drive between 8am and 4pm during the week will somehow improve things!
The reason they have accidents mostly after 4pm is that they’re out of school or work then, and the real problems – their lack of skill and their attitudes – come to the fore.
It should come as no surprise to learn that 83% of youngsters were opposed to night curfews (i.e. 17% supported it). Surprisingly, only 27% of parents thought it was a good idea and 46% opposed it (though HeraldScotland words that differently).
Brake has its own ideas (graduated licensing). IAM reckons it couldn’t be enforced. And the RAC Foundation said lower insurance premiums would be more effective (go figure that one)!
Addendum:
I’ve had an email from the RAC Foundation in response to this topic:
What we said was that insurance is already prohibitively high for many people creating the danger that more and more motorists drive uninsured. There are some policies which restrict the times drivers can take to the road – i.e. the dangerous times – and in return get a cut in their premiums. That means we have more people insured and less young people on the roads at the riskiest periods of day and night. Simply hiking insurance costs does not mean the most dangerous drivers are priced off the road.
I should point out that all HeraldScotland quotes the Foundation as saying is:
If young people can save money they are more likely to limit their behaviour.
And nothing more. When it is worded like that, I disagree entirely. It sounds like a proposal to reward people who are behaving badly without trying to alter their behaviour in any way. After all, having to pay high insurance is no excuse for driving dangerously.
However, the additional explanation the Foundation has provided makes more sense up to a point. I agree that providing restrictive conditions in return for insurance cover for dangerous (and potentially dangerous or naïve) drivers is a good idea – but only if it uses black box technology to enforce it. Without such enforcement, conditional insurance is equivalent to no insurance, because it WILL be abused.
If hiking insurance doesn’t keep dangerous drivers off the roads, how can lowering premiums do it?
The underlying problem is with attitude and behaviour, and no matter what you do with insurance premiums, unless you change those attitudes and behaviours then you aren’t addressing the problem!
Of course, the claims these now-insured dangerous drivers spawn will have to be covered by everyone else’s policies being hiked. The money has to come from somewhere.
The only way we’re ever going to stop these idiots killing themselves – and others – is either by changing the way they drive, or by not letting them drive in the first place, There is no middle option.