Diary Of An ADI - A Driving Instructor's Blog

Another Driving Test Impostor Jailed

02/09/2013

Solomon Tweneboah, 34, has been jailed for 3 years for taking driving tests for other people. He charged £600 a time for the Theory Test and £1,000 for the Practical Test. All driving licences gained via Tweneboah have been revoked.

Tweneboah doesn’t appear to have been one of the brightest sparks in the fire. He failed to complete three attempts at bogus Theory Tests when staff became suspicious each time of the fact that he looked nothing like the photo on the provisional licences he presented. In the case of the Practical Tests, he was sussed immediately and an investigation started.

Lesson Prices

31/08/2013

DOAADI

ADI

This is an old article, originally from pre-2010. The national school rate as of late 2022 is £30-plus. And BSM is now part of the same group as The AA.

There’s an argument going on on one of the forums at the moment. Actually, there’s always an argument going on on one of the forums somewhere on this subject: lesson prices and special offers.

The aim of any business is to make as large a profit as possible, by charging the highest price the market will stand.

The market is different for every business. Smaller players may have to compensate for not having a known brand by charging a lower price for their products – although for luxury items, they can often increase their prices a little.

The biggest players will set the price that others base their own prices on.

And so it is (or should be) with driving instructors. The big national players like BSM and the AA set the base price – which varies from one county to the next – and the smaller schools charge somewhere around that figure for the area they cover. But there is a problem…

Driving instructors are not always the best business people you could meet, and this has become even more true over the last 10 years or so. The huge influx of uneducated people desperate to earn £30,000 (as seen on TV) has meant that good business practice has gone out of the window. Once they had been doing the job for a while, many of these people realised that they could only ever hope to get anywhere near £30,000 if they had bucket loads of work. Therefore, they immediately went out and bought lots of buckets and set out to fill them!

They reasoned that if everyone else was charging £25 an hour, then if they charged £23 or £24 they would attract more work. So far, no problem. This is standard business practice: small price cuts to provide an incentive to consumers (although you have to remember that it also has to be advertised, which also costs money – but this is a worthwhile investment if it gets new work).

However, as more and more people came in chasing the elusive £30,000 and started offering the same price cuts, the baseline being chased was no longer the £25 from the big schools, but the £23 or £24 being charged by direct competitors. In order to maintain a differential as a marketing ploy prices fell further and further. At present, in an area where the national school rate is still £25, I’ve seen people charging as little as £15!

Bearing in mind that most driving instructors have weekly overheads of between £200-300, that original £25 rate would give a weekly income of around £625, based on 35 hours tuition per week. Allowing for 4 weeks holiday a year, that comes to an annual income of £30,000 (or just under £19 per hour). A reasonable salary, really.

If someone is charging £15 an hour, though, their annual income is only £13,200 (or around £8 an hour)! That’s not so good, is it? And bearing in mind that a 35 hour week is hard to maintain, the situation is far worse for those charging low lesson rates.

Anyway, back to the main subject. Fortunately, some instructors realised that price cutting only worked up to a point, beyond which they were cutting their own throats. But they still had to attract work somehow. This is where the Special Offer came in. I suppose you could argue that the current known form of Special Offer originated with the Bill Plant Driving School :

First 5 hours for £56

This was plastered all over their cars right from the start, and was instantly unpopular with other instructors. Why? Well, “first 5 hours for £56” works out at £11.20 an hour, and almost to a man (or woman) everyone assumed that Bill Plant charged £11.20 an hour, when in fact they charge something like £21-22 an hour once the first five lessons are out of the way.

“How can anyone earn a living on that?”, they cried. “It’s destroying the profession” they postulated. “Bill Plant is scum”, they ranted.

The simple fact is that Bill Plant charges £21 an hour. But the school attracts new business by offering the first five lessons for £56 (and there are conditions attached, even then). Even taken at face value – minus the conditions – the offer translates to a £50 investment in each new pupil. If you didn’t have the pupil, you’d earn nothing. If the offer attracts them, all they have to do is a further 3 hours after the offer is up and the instructor is back in profit – and seeing as most of them will do 10, 20… 50, 60 hours… well, £50 isn’t a bad investment in something that would otherwise have earned you absolutely nothing.

The initial hatred and misunderstanding directed towards Bill Plant hasn’t eased much. Some instructors still stupidly believe that Bill Plant charges £11.20 an hour for its lessons. However, the Special Offer idea has crossed over to quite a few driving schools run by people who have a better business head than most. It is now common to see the “5 for £55” type of offer (often worded as “first two hours free” or “£11 per hour for the first five lessons”). Terms & conditions often stipulate that the free/reduced price lessons must be taken at the start and end of the course – presumably to deter instructor-hoppers, who are too stupid to realise that keep changing instructors means it takes much longer to get to test standard, even if you think you’re clever by picking up all the Special Offer deals.

The simple fact is that if you don’t have the work, running a Special Offer is – as long as it works – a brilliant way of getting new pupils.

The big national schools do it, often giving away free lessons in national newspapers or via deals with certain large companies for their staff. However, they finance it themselves, and the instructor working under the franchise usually gets a full hourly rate. The solo ADI (and Bill Plant franchisees, I believe) has to bankroll the offer out of their own pockets, though.

EDIT 30/12/2010: Just a note on that last paragraph – I am now given to believe that BSM franchisees also have to bankroll special offers out of their own profits. This appears to have been since the management buyout a while back. They kept that one secret!

Long Hot Summer 2013

31/08/2013

DOAADI

General, News

Summer 2013 has been the warmest, driest, and sunniest since 2006. It’s likely to be one of the top 10 hottest, 16th driest, and 7th sunniest since records began. This is official – from the Met Office.

I think it’s important that we remind ourselves of what the Met Office was saying only three months ago. It was reporting that we’d have no summers for the next decade – The Guardian reported on this, as did The Independent, and the Daily Mail, etc. The best part in all the reports was:

Met Office experts who got together to discuss recent unusual weather patterns predicted yesterday that Britain faces a decade of wet summers.

Of course, everyone knows what this summer has really been like – after all, when one is classed as “the 16th driest” it can hardly be simultaneously classed as a wet one. It’s still going on even now, as we enter autumn, and it looks likely to continue for a while yet if the Jetstream forecasts are anything to go by.

But I’m surprised that no one has hit on the Met Office over this. They haven’t successfully forecast any single part of this summer – when you look at the original stories, it was like them betting their entire pile of chips on red, but having it come up black. They were 180° degrees wrong!

Mind you, this year has thankfully been free of any involvement by Exacta or Jonathan Powell.

Driving Test Results Rigged?

31/08/2013

DOAADI

ADI, Driving Tests, DSA

UPDATED

I’ve updated this article, which was originally written 3 years ago (September 2010). The subject is going through one of its periodic revivals among the ignorati across various web forums. The sack

At the time I wrote the original, there was a story doing the rounds on these forums concerning someone who called himself Jim Kerr. He claimed he had been an examiner for 23 years, and he said:

I HAVE JUST BEEN SACKED BY THE D.S.A.. WHY? I HEAR YOU ASK.

BECAUSE, ACCORDING TO D.S.A.’S NEW “CHI” SYSTEM OF COLLECTING PASS RATES FOR EXAMINERS AT EACH TEST CENTRE, MY PASS RATE WAS HIGHER THAN THE OTHER EXAMINERS AT [named test centre] AND SO I MUST BE DOING IT WRONG.

There was much more, but that was the essence of his letter. Apparently, he’d put it into leaflet form and was handing it to people turning up for their tests outside the test centre he’d been sacked from. This act alone said a lot about the kind of person he must have been, and about the kind of person his employer had to put up with.

Anyway, when the story broke there was the deafening sound of several thousand colostomy bags all popping at the same time as ADIs logged on to the internet for their weekly surf and saw the story! You see, many in this industry sincerely believe that driving tests are rigged, and a story like this is guaranteed to get them hyperventilating. But let’s just do a reality check for a moment.

No company the size of the DSA (now known as DVSA) sacks someone on the spot for the sort of thing Kerr was claiming. They know bloody well that people like Kerr are “union” through and through, and they will only act if they’ve jumped through all the right hoops – or if they are sure of gross misconduct having been committed. What usually happens in a situation like the one Kerr is claiming is that retraining is given first of all. If that fails there will be further retraining. If that also fails then you’re into verbal warnings, written warnings, and final warnings. If there are still issues once all that has been done then dismissal is likely to follow. Companies who want to dismiss staff need a cast iron case and – except in the case of gross misconduct – a properly constructed paper trail.

Judging from the geographic location of the test centre in question, I’d be very surprised if Kerr hadn’t been in the union – and even if he wasn’t, if his claims came even close to being true he’d have been awarded a knighthood for wrongful dismissal at any tribunal! He certainly didn’t need to behave like a complete arsehole and picket the test centre to get justice.

In other words: there was probably something Kerr wasn’t telling us about his dismissal (see the original update to this story for confirmation).

But what about his claims? Is there any truth in them? Well, when I qualified my supervising examiner (also a test centre manager) told me this:

You’ll hear a lot of stories about quotas. They aren’t true.

What I do is monitor all my examiners, and if one of them has a significantly higher or lower variance than the rest I look into it. If we identify a problem then this is dealt with.

I am a scientist by training, and I understand maths and statistics. What my supervising examiner told me can therefore be summarised as follows (note that in this updated version I refer to a variance of 5% instead of the 10% that was being used at the time I wrote the original article):

over a period of time, with hundreds of tests conducted, you would expect every examiner to have roughly the same pass rate, give or take a few percent variance
the national average pass rate is around 45%, so over time you would expect the average pass rate for each individual examiner to be around the same figure, plus or minus a variance
if one examiner had a pass rate of say 40% and another had 45%, then it wouldn’t matter because they both fall within an acceptable band either side of the mean (i.e. ±5% variance)
if one examiner had a pass rate of, say, 20% or 60%, or if their variance was always skewed high or low, then this would point to a possible problem with the way they were conducting tests
if the anomalous pass rate continued across several monitoring periods of, say, 3 months each, then a genuine issue with the examiner’s test performance would be confirmed

Most people don’t understand maths and statistics, and they cannot accept that a single examiner consistently having a grossly different pass rate to everyone else proves that there is a problem with that examiner. Kerr appears to be one of these ignorant people, believing his distorted understanding to be some sort of epiphany. As I say, I’ve known what happens since I qualified as an instructor and it is no big deal.

Kerr obviously couldn’t understand that his higher pass rate pointed to him doing his job differently to everyone else. The update to this story shows clearly that Kerr was being a little creative with the truth, and that he had been spoken to on several occasions. He simply refused to change, believing that he – as a minority of one – was right, and that all the other examiners out there were wrong.

There is one aspect of the system the DSA uses which has always worried me, though – and it isn’t the DSA’s fault. Not directly, anyway. Imagine this perfect world scenario:

over a typical monitoring period, an examiner has a pass rate of 60% – a variance of 15% above the average for his test centre
this is flagged to the examiner by his line manager, but over the next monitoring period nothing changes
the DSA uses its internal procedure to re-train the examiner, as he is clearly passing some candidates who ought to be failing (obviously, the situation would be the same if the examiner’s pass rate was 15% below the average for the test centre, and he was failing people who ought to be passing)
That last part is totally beyond the comprehension of many ADIs (and examiners like Kerr). However, it is absolutely correct and proper: if the pass rate for the test centre in question is 45%, and if everyone else is passing/failing at around the same rate (±5% variance), then someone who is consistently passing/failing at a much higher/lower rate must doing their job wrong. It’s a simple fact.Now imagine a real world scenario to see where the trouble potentially starts:
over a monitoring period, an examiner has a pass rate of 60% – a variance of 15% above the average
this is flagged to the examiner by his line manager
the examiner fears losing his job and decides to take matters into his own hands
the examiner keeps a tally of his passes and fails, and randomly fails a few people for minor (driver) faults if he needs to bring his variance down to acceptable levels (i.e. within the ±5% acceptable variance)

There is absolutely no way that this isn’t happening somewhere out there. However, the issue is not that it is happening – but rather that there is no way to stop it. No matter what system the DSA used it would still happen in one form or another between unscrupulous examiners eager to conceal their own incompetence. Ironically, if they did their jobs properly in the first place there’d be no problem for them to try and hide, and they’d all be within the ±5% variance. In spite of all that, it is vital to understand that those examiners fiddling their results are in a tiny minority, and this in no way supports claims of “quotas” or fixed results from ADIs and disgruntled learners. Of all the many hundreds of tests my own pupils have sat, there are perhaps just two that sound a little fishy – and since I do not sit in on most tests I am only going on what the pupil has told me. There is no way that the examiners in Nottingham are unique in their overall consistency, and people like Kerr are the exception rather than the rule.

But back to Kerr’s claims. As you can imagine, this Revelation in The Gospel According To Jim Kerr is Manna From Heaven for some ADIs. One one forum alone someone opines:

I guess the reason the DSA doesnt [sic] want the contents of the leaflet published is that, they dont [sic] want us to know about their ‘variances’ or the new “chi” sytem [sic] of making sure the DE’s have to work within a certain amount of passes/fails, and how the DE’s have to comply with them. Although many ADI’s have known about it for a long time.

It’s hard to get this many contradictions and misunderstandings into two sentences… unless you’re so excited your fingers and brain are not in proper sync!

A variance is something that happens – not something you apply. If the DSA has decided that a variance of greater than ±5% indicates a problem, then that is the system being used as a quality control check. As I have already explained, if the variance is consistently outside ±5% then there is a definite problem. They can call their system whatever they like: Harriet, Tarquin… or chi. The name doesn’t alter what it is.

Do driving examiners fail people deliberately?

The short answer is NO. They do not. They are not told to fail people as part of any quota, and this applies to the vast majority of examiners throughout the UK. However, there are corrupt people in all walks of life, and as I explained above, it is possible that some examiners – a tiny percentage – will attempt fiddle their pass rates in order to avoid being “told off” by their managers.

What is the 5% variance that examiners have to keep to?

There isn’t one. The ±5% variance is something that is measured – not applied. Examiners are not told to “keep” to anything, though they are expected to perform within certain limits as a quality control measure. If any examiner is misinterpreting this and deliberately fixing their results, then they are simply being dishonest.

Are examiners told to keep their pass rates within ±5%?

No. That ±5% is a range within which each examiner’s pass rate is expected to fall, and if they’re doing their job properly in the first place then their pass rate will fall within that range. If an examiner’s pass rate consistently falls outside of the ±5% range then the DSA has internal systems which it uses to apply retraining because that examiner is not performing to an acceptable standard. Retraining is a minor issue, but less informed examiners might see it as a threat to their job security and therefore they might attempt to force the pass rate. This would be entirely the decision of the individual examiner. It is not a DSA policy.

Do quotas exist?

No. The idea of quotas is promulgated mainly by poorly educated ADIs and learners anxious to defend their poor performances on test.

What is the best day of the week to take your driving test?

There isn’t one as such. If you can drive, it doesn’t matter if you take your test on Monday morning or Friday afternoon. The idea that by Friday all the quota has been “used up” is nonsense. I’ve had lots of passes on Friday afternoons – just as I have on all other days.

What The Hell Is An EU No Entry Sign?

30/08/2013

DOAADI

ADI, News

This article from the newsfeeds tells how drivers in Rochdale are ignoring a No Entry sign. It’s a local story, and no big deal otherwise.

However, the part that really confuses me is this:

A police spokesman said: “Some drivers may be confused, as this is a European Union standard sign and not the usual ‘red circle with white bar’ No Entry we all know from the Highway Code.

“However, ignorance of the law is still no excuse, the signage is legal and enforceable…”

Various questions spring to mind. Like, why are signs which aren’t in the Highway Code being used? And, what the hell IS an EU No Entry sign? Or, how can it be enforceable if no one knows what it means due to the absence of any British instructions on how to use it?

No Entry Sign - It's all in the style, apparently

The simple fact is that a No Entry sign is a No Entry sign. The only differences will be in the size and associated wording, and Rochdale police are not just barking up the wrong tree – they’re in the wrong bloody forest!.

If you look it up, the No Entry sign we all know is actually standard across the world (well, most of it). Wikipedia explains:

The abstract ‘No Entry’ sign was officially adopted to standardization at the League of Nations convention in Geneva in 1931. The sign was adapted from Swiss usage. The Swiss, in turn, adopted the practice of former European states that marked their boundaries with their formal shields and, when not wishing visitors to enter, would indicate so by tying a blood-red ribbon horizontally around the shield.^{[citation needed]} The sign is also known as C1, from its definition in the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals.

The European ‘No Entry’ sign was adopted into North American uniform signage in the 1970s, replacing its rectangular, white “Do Not Enter” sign, although the U.S. version retains the wording “Do Not Enter” where the European and Canadian version typically has no wording on it.

So, it would appear that Rochdale’s police are making this far more complicated than it really is due to their own lack of understanding. If whatever sign is being used there doesn’t consist of a red circle with a white bar in the middle, then surely it is not a valid sign after all, and motorists would have a sound argument if they challenged any charges against them.

Unfortunately, Rochdale Online doesn’t appear to run to being able to afford a photographer, so the offending motorists and signs cannot be seen.

It would appear that the correct signs are going to be installed shortly. I wonder what idiot put the wrong ones in – if, indeed, they’re actually wrong at all?

Test Pass: 29/8/2013

30/08/2013

DOAADI

Driving Tests

Well done Sarah, who passed today first time with just 2 driver faults.After all that negativity you’ve been coming out with over the last few weeks, I have to say I told you so.

In fact, I had to force her to take her theory test as well as her practical – if I’d left it to her we’d still be taking lessons in December! But she’s been another one of those it’s been a pleasure to teach, and I am certain she’ll be a safe driver once she eventually makes her mind up over the car she wants and gets out there.

Test Pass: 27/8/2013

27/08/2013

DOAADI

ADI, Driving Tests, Transport

Well done Mitch, who passed today with 5 driver faults. This was his third attempt – he should have passed those other two times, but the pupils you have most faith in are often the ones who often end up doing something silly. Not this time, though. A well-deserved licence is on its way!

We had to do a circuitous route to the test centre. I heard on the news before setting out that a train had derailed in Carlton (today was the first full day the line was in operation after five weeks of closure for signal and rail upgrading). The Netherfield barriers were down and there were long delays. We managed to bypass all that – but reports are that the damaged line could take many days to repair, and also the new signals have been damaged.

Free Driving School. Is It Really A Viable Business Model?

27/08/2013

DOAADI

ADI, News, Training

UPDATED

When I first saw this I thought it was from America, then I thought is was April Fools’ Day – but it really is genuine.

The story reports that a company has launched a “free driving school”. It goes without saying that if there really were schools offering genuinely free driving courses and running successful businesses out of it then the rest of us would go bankrupt overnight. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, and nor should you.

Teaching people to drive for free is not a business model. In reality, someone somewhere has got to bankroll the free lessons. This applies to any “free” service or product. Bearing that in mind, the fog clears a little when you discover that the company who’s doing this, Stoneacre Motor Group, is a new & used car dealership.

The story says that Stoneacre had a problem with its apprentices not being able to drive. Since apprentices tend to be very young, very skint, and highly unlikely to have started driving lessons by themselves, and since Stoneacre needed them to be able to transport vehicles between branches, they decide to get around this by introducing their own in-house driver training. Up to this point, it’s a great idea.

However, due to the “success” of the scheme, it then came up with the idea of extending it “to the public”.

In actual fact, this statement is somewhat misleading, because when they say “the public” they mean “anyone who buys a car from us”. The story (and Stoneacre’s website) makes that quite clear. The website also says that there’s “no catch” – well, since they are up front about you having to buy a car from them first, that statement does appear to be otherwise true. They claim on their website that the number of lessons provided is “unlimited”:

The scheme allows you to take as many free lessons as you need in preperation (sic) for your driving test and could potentially save you £100’s of pounds in fees.

This rather strange wording, and quite reserved. If lessons were really “unlimited”, you’d expect it to definitely save many hundreds – and possibly thousands – of pounds so you’d be shouting that from the rooftops. The website also says:

In order to take advantage of the Stoneacre driving school you either have to buy a car from the group or recommend a family member or friend who goes on to buy a car.

Again, this is odd wording. It seems to preclude anyone from buying a car and then just giving the free lessons to someone else (like a son or daughter). The person who gets the free lessons appears to be required to organise the entire transaction in advance, and I can’t see too many parents listening to their 17-year old for advice on where to buy the next family car, or choosing one dealer over another purely on the basis that they give free driving lessons from them. But I guess that Stoneacre is relying on the likelihood that the offer will attract enough attention to sell a few extra cars.

Anybody who has ever looked into buying a new car will have encountered the enormous and confusing range both of models and prices quoted for the same model across different dealerships. In just one example resulting from a quick Google search, prices for the Corsa Ecoflex S model range between £7,990 and the list price of £11,570 (a whopping 30% range). Even the dealer with the lowest price will still be making a huge profit (when was the last time you saw a car dealer driving around in a banged up Micra?). So with a 30% price range to play with, who would ever know if you slapped a monkey on the price to cover a course of “free” driving lessons? Alternatively, of course, you could simply take the hit of the “unlimited” number of free lessons right in your profits, but let’s be realistic about this…

Used car prices present an even more fertile area for creative pricing. At least with a new car you do have the list price as distant baseline to refer to. With used cars there is nothing. Even where attempts are made to provide guide prices the interpretation over what constitutes “good”, “poor”, or indifferent in terms of the condition of the vehicle is will be subjective. And a bit of chromed plastic stuck on the back, turning a basic model into a “ghia” or something with an “i” in it, can add hundreds. Hiding £500 within used car prices would be easier still.

And then there’s the “package” you get. In the 80s I bought a used Ford Cortina Mk IV from a dealer. It looked immaculate on the forecourt, and came with “free servicing and repairs* for 12 months”. The most important part of that phrase turned out to be the “*”, which roughly translates as “unless you need anything doing to it, and excluding certain things such as labour, brakes, and clutch, and all the other stuff you’ll most likely need”. It meant that I was liable for significant labour costs at the service if it needed anything doing to it (a huge part of any repair bill) and the whole of the brakes bill (things that wore out naturally were excluded from the “free” service). And although that car looked immaculate on the forecourt, after a few weeks it became clear that it had had a substantial paint job carried out on it to conceal corrosion. By the time I got rid of it some years later it was a rust bucket, and I spent a lot of time and money patching it up while I owned it.

That “free package” was part of the dealer’s justification for the price I paid, and that was probably around £500-£1,000 more than I’d have paid for the same car from a private seller. But since I had to buy it on finance, buying privately wasn’t an option – something that applies to many car buyers today. The dealers know this, which is why they offer attractive “packages” in the first place. Things are no different now – dealers do not give things away. They just word their offers to make it look like they do.

Another version of the story quotes the company MD:

As far as we’re aware the scheme is a first for the motor industry and our initial trial has been a huge success with the demand for free driving lessons heavily outweighing capacity and far exceeding our initial expectations.

This is misleading unless you take it in context with what they have to offer at the moment. At the time of writing they only have two instructors – one covering Doncaster, the other Peterborough – and it doesn’t take much to “outweigh capacity” in one instructor’s diary, particularly if he or she is salaried (Stoneacre implies that theirs are) and not working weekends or late evenings.

I don’t begrudge Stoneacre trying to sell more cars using this scheme – good luck to them – but I think they will run into serious problems somewhere along the line. The first issue to catch up with them is likely to be that word “unlimited”. As long as their pupils are passing their tests after 30 hours or less then the necessary costs will be easily soaked up and everyone will be happy – but pick up a few people who have difficulties and start running into 40, 50, or more hours, and bells will start ringing in the finance department. Moreover, if one of those learners appears who you know absolutely should not be driving, and who is going to end up taking lots of lessons and lots of tests, is Stoneacre going to stick with them? And if it does, should it? Also, has Stoneacre considered that as time goes by you tend to collect a sizeable group of slower learners, and there will be periods when most of your capacity is taken by these?

Another issue is the value of the lessons relative to the purchase made. I had a pupil pass his test recently who is planning to get a car in the next few weeks. When I asked him how much he was planning to spend he replied “under £1,000”, and he is far from being untypical of decent 17-year old drivers. The lower the value of the car, the harder it is to conceal “free lessons” in its price – try it, and the price immediately goes outside of the range the buyer is interested in. OK, you might entice a few to spend a little more than they intended – and maybe that’s what is being counted on here – but it will simply result in hugely overpriced cars which, in time, will pull overall sales down.

Remember that there is no such thing as a “free lesson”. If the pupil doesn’t pay for it, the instructor has to. And driving around using up fuel just increases the amount of money the instructor loses – which is why the “free” lessons from certain pseudo-national driving schools always involve an hour sitting in a car park talking. The margins on driving lessons are already small, leaving no wiggle room for creative pricing. Stoneacre has effectively forced itself to either cut profits or increase prices – and that second option is likely to lead to reduced sales, which then cuts profits anyway.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Stoneacre’s finances were being run by one of those cheapo driving instructors who are trying to commit business suicide with a business model like this.

It seems that the offer of free lessons isn’t as all-encompassing as was originally implied. This article says that the only people eligible are those buying a 63-plate car (i.e. a brand new one). So unless the lessons are freely transferrable, the people who would most benefit probably won’t.

More FOI Driving Test Rubbish

25/08/2013

DOAADI

ADI, Driving Tests, DSA, News

I’ve mentioned in various article recently about FOI requests, and how they are able to bring the average hack at local newspapers to orgasm in five seconds flat.

This one is quite amusing, because it is particularly inept in its attempts to interpret statistics. The headline trumpets that Blackburn is the hardest place in Lancashire to take your driving test. It then goes on to cite a pass rate of 47.7% compared to the average of 51.5% across the county (Lancashire).

That is statistical noise, and is meaningless. It’s even inside the 5% variance that the DSA uses to make sure its examiners are doing their jobs properly. But that doesn’t stop a driving instructor from saying:

Some other areas are definitely a lot easier, but I think it’s a very good thing to drive here. If you can drive in Blackburn you can drive anywhere.

Someone else who doesn’t realise that a 4% difference is meaningless, or that 47% and 51% do not constitute “easy” and “hard”.

McDonalds Drive-thru Abused Once More

25/08/2013

DOAADI

Bad Drivers, News

McDonalds has a clear policy regarding use of its drive-thru facilities. That page was last updated in March 2011, and it runs as follows (appalling grammar in the question left uncorrected):

What are the policies for service in the drive thru lanes?

Q: i have a serious question for you what is the polices for your drive thru i was refused service because i came thru on a bicycle in the drive thru and there is nothing stating that bicycle are allowed and will be refused service i would like to know why that is because i am seriously offended

A: Thanks for your question. McDonald’s drive thru is for people in motor vehicles only, bicycles are not permitted on our drive thru due to the health and safety policies we have in place.

Now, I mentioned a few weeks ago how some idiot attempted to go through one on horseback. She was so deranged that she forced her daughter to drag her horse into the restaurant, whereupon it crapped on the floor – probably as a result of being frightened – while people were eating. Well, this story tells how some idiot on a bicycle tried the same trick and was similarly refused service.

Of course, being in The Mail, it is obviously McDonalds who are in the wrong.

The idiot in question this time was one of those clowns who rides around with a baby-buggy trailer on his bike. In this particular case, he had his 4-year old son in the damned thing. I wonder what publicity he’d now be seeking if he’d have been hit by a motorist who didn’t see the bloody thing sticking out behind?

The funny thing is that the prat waited in the queue of cars for 15 minutes before reaching the window. He’d have gotten served in less than five minutes if he’d have simply gone inside. He displays the sort of logic common to cyclists:

I was baffled. If my bike is safe enough for the road, surely it is safe enough for a drive-thru in a car park with a 5mph limit? It’s a daft policy.

I’ll wager that it doesn’t take much to baffle him under normal circumstances if he finds this one confusing.

The Mail has got plenty of pictures of him at the drive-thru – all set up for the occasion, of course. And they quote a Health & Safety Executive (HSE) spokesman:

[he] said there was no legislation preventing cyclists from using a drive-thru.

‘McDonald’s should state the real reason for turning away cyclists rather than using health and safety as a catch-all…”

McDonalds has not said that there WAS legislation, nor have they used it as a “catch-all”. They make it clear that it is THEIR policy on health & safety grounds. See the difference? You have “Health & Safety” with capitals, and “health & safety” in lower case – one is a pile of idiotic bureaucracy, and the other an attempt to apply common sense whilst still being bound by idiotic rules from the other. See if you can work out which one’s which. I also wonder if that HSE clown would have argued the same about the silly cow on the horse?

And in any case, if a cyclist WAS to be injured at a drive-thru, the HSE would be all over McDonalds like a rash. And by that, I mean a sudden and really nasty rash – not the lingering, long-term rash that the HSE is to businesses the rest of the time.

It appears that McDonalds has got a real problem with people of restricted intelligence trying to use the drive-thrus. The Mail’s story mentions how last month it turned away a 76-year old on a mobility scooter from a branch. McDonald’s apparently apologised – but they shouldn’t have.