New Driver Restrictions – Another Take

17/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, Bad Drivers, DSA, News

Another feed on that previous story about the possibility of new drivers facing bans on carrying passengers comes from Sky News.

I wanted to mention it because it refers to Drive IQ. I’ve written about this group before. To be honest, I can’t figure out how they fit in with the BTEC anymore, because they describe themselves as “100% not-for-profit”, and yet from what I remember they used to charge a pretty hefty sum for access to the full range of learning materials and were forever looking at ways of modifying the pricing structure to increase the dire take-up rate. The last thing I saw from them suggested that you could sign up for the course at a reduced price, but had to pay extra if you wanted a certificate at the end of it! Their website still refers to “Drive IQ Pro” (delivered by an ADI), and that definitely used to involve money changing hands and I can’t see how that has changed. However, Drive IQ is being pushed in schools so perhaps that facet of it really is not-for-profit, even though funding has to come from somewhere. It’s all very confusing – and road safety shouldn’t be.

The mother of a girl killed in a road accident (young, unlicensed male driver) is backing the Drive IQ programme. She says:

When it comes to young people being safer in cars, lack of knowledge can kill. I know that only too well.

Although I feel for her, she is sadly misguided in this analysis, particularly when you consider that the driver of the car her daughter was a passenger in hit a tree at 80mph!

Lack of knowledge isn’t the problem – every driver since the dawn of time (and I’m thinking as far back as carts drawn by animals here) has had to deal with lack of knowledge, gradually building up both that and their experience until they become competent drivers.

The problem is that whereas once upon a time most teenagers wouldn’t have dreamed of stealing a car and driving illegally for fear of getting a clip round the ear, today’s crop contains far too many who wouldn’t think twice about doing it regularly. Teenagers in the past knew it was wrong, and avoided doing things that were wrong. The dividing line between right and wrong back then was clearly defined by appropriate punishments.

These days they grow up without any such divisions being built into them. That’s what the problem is. Not a lack of knowledge, but a complete inability to deal with that lack. The driver of that car the girl was killed in almost certainly wasn’t doing 80mph because he was inexperienced or “didn’t know” – he was doing it because he was a juvenile prat.

As I mentioned in a recent post on Client-centred Learning, the DSA has now introduced its own syllabus for dealing with issues relating to the higher levels of the GDE Matrix. This is much more closely aligned with the driving test, simply by virtue of being under the DSA umbrella.

The biggest problem is that no course can force any ADI to cover anything other than the absolute bare minimum required to pass the driving test. Similarly, unless the Law changes, nothing can stop an increasing number of learners wanting to pass in the shortest possible time by spending the least possible amount of money. Ironically, those most likely to want to spend the least amount of money to pass their tests are inexorably drawn towards those ADIs most likely to only cover the barest minimum of the syllabus (i.e. the ones who charge stupid low prices, and so who cannot afford to teach the full syllabus). And so the downward spiral continues.

The only flaw with the DSA syllabus – and the same flaw exists to even greater degrees with other initiatives – is that ADIs will not be forced to implement it.

And the “government” shows further naïveté when  Louise Ellman, chair of the Commons Transport Select Committee, says:

There should be support for voluntary activities, perhaps in schools, perhaps in driving clubs to develop positive attitudes towards driving before people actually take their tests.

It goes far, far deeper than that.

New Drivers Could Be Banned From Carrying Passengers

17/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, Bad Drivers, News

A story on the newsfeeds, and covered in various places, says that the government is considering banning new drivers from carrying any passengers unless they are family members.

A ban on carrying any passengers is also a possibility.

The proposals are in reply to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), who have previously Police Accident Signreported on high premiums due to a disproportionate number of accidents involving young drivers. I reported on this back in October this year – at the time, the media had latched on to the minimum of one year to learn aspect.

As I also mentioned in a very recent post (posted, ironically, in response to do-gooder ADIs trying to claim that today’s youth are above reproach), 12.5% (1 in 8) of drivers are young and newly qualified, but they account for 33% of road deaths. Fortunately, someone out there is at least trying to act on the facts and not the baloney.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been on a lesson with a pupil, and we’ve been cut up by a Corsa with 5 males in it, all staring back and grinning like half-witted gargoyles at how clever they’ve all just been.

The report also refers back to the ABI suggestion about a curfew. As I recently noted, young male drivers are already seven times more at risk than all males put together – but this rockets to seventeen times more at risk at night.

The Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) continues to keep completely out of touch with reality by arguing against these suggestions, and yet again blaming it on the training young people receive. IAM seems incapable of understanding that lack of experience can never be bought by the lorry-load and applied overnight – it takes time for normal driving skills to consolidate when a new driver starts driving on their own.

The only way of stopping young, new drivers from killing themselves on rural bends while out with a car full of mates in the dark at midnight is to stop them from being able to have a car full of mates in the dark after midnight in the first place! Any fool ought to be able to see this.

The average 17-year old male these days has a mental age of at least 5 years younger (and often more) – I see this time and again when I drop them off after lessons near to shops or other places where their mates are all waiting with their BMX bikes, shouting and arseing around. Adults don’t generally behave like that – children generally do.

It seems that far too many people – ADIs included – cannot understand that the average 17-year old who kills himself and one or more of his passengers while showing off in the dark (or due to thinking he was a better driver than he was) does not actually sit there and say “today, I am going to behave like a total wanker in my Corsa and kill all my mates”. He does it because he’s an inexperienced 17-year old male with a serious attitude problem.

Inexperience and a bad attitude are the worst combination imaginable. Inexperience becomes experience with time – but the bad attitude is another matter entirely.

Banning them from dangerous situations while their skills and brains mature a little with their new licence makes far more sense than the pointless aim of trying to teach experience in the blink of an eye, which is what IAM keeps prattling on about.

New drivers should not be taught advanced driving techniques by default – and certainly not openly. Christ, they can’t even do the nursery school stuff confidently in many cases (which is why they have the bloody accidents), so teaching them how to do high-speed police chase driving is just asking for trouble when it is going to be their attitude that is the main problem in the first place.

Of course, the chances of anything changing are extremely remote. It’s just more talk.

Instructor Rips Off Driving Test Hopefuls

17/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, DSA, News

This came in on the newsfeeds, and tells how ex-driving instructor, Mark Netherway, set up a scam where he was charging his pupils £62 for a “driving test” and £38 for the hire of his car.

Except that the “test” was a carefully concealed mock test conducted by another driving instructor, with absolutely no chance of anyone getting a licence out of it.

The instructor carrying out the mock tests was apparently totally innocent. That strikes me as odd, because if another instructor was paying me to do a mock test on one of his pupils I’m pretty sure that that’s the first thing I’d mention when I met them. But that’s just me – as I’ve said before, some instructors really get off on dressing up and pretending to be examiners, so I suppose it’s possible that if one of these anorak-types was doing it the whole affair could go unnoticed.

The story has also been picked up on the forums and, as usual, everything is apparently the DSA’s fault. Just a couple of comments on this.

First of all, if anyone actually bothered to read the report properly, they would see that Netherway’s defence lawyer said:

He was making a success of it [being an ADI] but his livelihood is now lost to him.

“Lost to him” means that he is no longer an instructor. So people should stop trying to suggest that he might be allowed to get away with it by the big, bad DSA.

And secondly, just about every newly qualified ADI – and especially those who hyperventilate when they are going to do a mock test and get to dress up in a hi-vis jacket – has desperately wanted to get their hands on blank DL25 (Driving Test) Marking Sheets. The DSA went through a phase a couple of years ago where they even placed piles of them in test centre waiting rooms – it was entertaining to see ADIs scoop up handfuls of them. Obviously it was essential to conduct mock tests with a real sheet instead of a copy.

But according to some it would appear that the DSA is at fault for this, too. It seems that Netherway’s stupidity and dishonesty is down to the DSA making DL25s available to ADIs! A far more logical (but still wrong) conclusion would be that all ADIs are inherently dishonest and untrustworthy, and cannot be trusted with copies of the blank DL25 sheet! Or that mock tests are at the root of the problem!

Hey, this is fun! Making up blame using illogical assumptions based on prejudice.

DSA Website Moved To GOV.UK

15/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, DSA

An email alert from the DSA confirms that the DSA website is now part of the larger GOV.UK site.

You can find the GOV.UK site here, or the DSA part in particular here.

Drivers, learner drivers, or ADIs/PDIs looking for information should go to this section (it’s under Driving, Transport & Travel on the main GOV.UK page) for information.

The online Highway Code is here.

The site is easy to navigate, and the information is clearly presented. No longer do you have to go the DVLA website for one thing, the DSA for another, and so on.

Of course, we await the emergence of another group of Wat Tylers to find fault with it, and to ignore the fact that it is a government initiative, not a DSA one. The DSA had little choice but to move – and the fact that they’ve moved cleanly and tidily is a huge bonus. The new site is far easier to use than the old DSA one.

Young Driver Accident Statistics

14/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, Bad Drivers, Education, Training

I was surprised to see on a forum that the fact that young people have more accidents was being disputed. Insurance companies don’t charge young people more just for fun – it’s based on factual data.

Some of the comments were opinion-based, and made no attempt to link to actual statistics. But the statistics are there for anyone who cares to look (unfortunately, too many people favour the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” mantra over facts, and appear to see no wrong in today’s young people).

This report from 2010, based on investigations by Admiral, reveals that 17 and 18 year olds are:

  • twice as likely to have an accident as someone in their 30s
  • three times as likely than someone in their 40s
  • six times as likely as someone over 50

The data cover 2 million motorists, so they’re hardly non-representative. Admiral also found that:

  • 13% of 17 and 18-year olds have had crashes
  • 6.5% of motorists overall have had crashes
  • 4.5% of those in  their 40s have had crashes
  • 2% of over 50s have had crashes

The cost of the claim was also revealing. The average claim value was:

  • £3,500 for 17 and 18-year olds
  • £1,741 for drivers overall
  • Accident claims by 17 and 18-year olds are five times more likely to include an injury to someone

A spokeswoman for Admiral said that the young driver statistics only seem to improve when they reach 25. The report also notes that those in the 17-21 age group are four times more likely than the average driver to be involved in a careless driving rap.

This report by Roadsafe (2009) also makes interesting reading. In particular the table on page 5, which compares factors involved in KSIs against age. It shows that 17-24 year olds are, when compared to over 25s:

  • more than twice as likely to lose control
  • twice as likely to be careless, reckless, or in a hurry
  • twice as likely to be caught out by road conditions
  • ten times as likely to be inexperienced, resulting in an accident
  • over twice as likely to be travelling too fast for the conditions
  • three times as likely to be exceeding the speed limit

This was comparing nearly 40,000 young driver KSIs with 150,000 older driver KSIs.

Brake, the road safety charity, reports that:

There is a wealth of research and casualty data showing that young drivers – particularly young male drivers – are at a much higher risk of crashing than older drivers.  They are therefore more at risk of losing their lives or being seriously injured on the road, often killing or injuring their young passengers or other road users too. For example, in the UK only one in eight driver licence holders is aged 25 or under, yet one in three drivers who die is under 25.

That is quite a sobering thought. That only 12.5% of the driving population accounts for 33% of all road deaths. The report also notes:

  • 17-20 year old males are seven times more at risk than all male drivers
  • between 2am and 5am they are seventeen times more at risk

Those wishy-washy liberals who can find no wrong in today’s youth need a good slap to wake them up. There is clearly a problem.

The Safe Roads Partnership says much the same thing, and also includes numerous report references for those ready to dispute the facts. Interestingly, they also point to Pass Plus as being a way of improving matters – which flies in the face of recent comments by ADIs that Pass Plus is a waste of time (it’s only a waste of time if the person delivering it is a crap instructor).

From my own perspective, I teach people to drive. How they choose to behave when they leave me is unfortunately out of my control, and no one is ever going to convince me otherwise. Part of the reason many of them DO behave so differently on their own is that they’ve been brought up badly by people who simply can’t see that there are problems, and so who don’t do anything about it. I mean parents and school teachers.

I say again: I teach them how to drive. I give them all the necessary skills to do what I did when I learnt to drive – and that is to take care and carry on learning. That’s what the driving test does. It allows people who have reached the first point on a lifelong learning curve to go out and move to the next level.

Unfortunately, modern youngsters have been brought up to believe differently. And that’s why we have such shocking statistics.

One more thing. It doesn’t matter if the number of deaths involving 17-24 year olds has fallen over the last 10 years. What matters is the proportion of deaths compared to other age groups – because that highlights the problem instead of trying to sweep it under the carpet.

Can You Practice Bay Parking At Colwick MPTC?

14/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, Driving Tests, DSA, Training

NO!

Someone found the blog on that search term. The test centre manager has had to put up signs telling instructors not to use the car park, because they were too stupid to understand the effect they were having on people who were on their tests. It wasn’t until the results of several tests were influenced by them getting in the way that he was forced to take action.

Even now, some instructors are so unbelievably thick that they still turn up to practice – and the reason is because they’re so bad at their jobs they can’t teach the manoeuvre anywhere else.

You do not need to practice the manoeuvre in there. I never have, and not one of my pupils has ever failed on the bay park exercise if they’ve got it on their test.

If you’re a learner and your ADI tries to take you in there, find another instructor quickly – one who actually knows what they’re doing! There are loads of car parks you can use – many of them much quieter (and some busier) than the test centre one when people are coming and going for test.

Just think how you’d feel if you were asked to bay park on your test, and some half-wit of an ADI turned up with a pupil to prat about in the car park right next to you. Well, think of that before you do it to someone else.

If I see anyone practising when I’m in the waiting room I report them in writing. School name, phone number, car registration.

A Storm In A (Very Small) Teacup

14/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, DSA, Training

I noticed another scuffle recently, where one instructor daring to suggest that they know something before anyone else ruffles the feathers of all the others who believe that only they are privy to “secret” information from the DSA.

It all seems to revolve around a supposed “leaked” internal document referring to proposals to change the qualifying process for ADIs. Let’s just clarify – this means people who aren’t ADIs, and who possibly haven’t even considered becoming one yet. It does not refer to anyone already doing the job.

The section in the document that is causing the trouble says:

…introducing a vocational qualification, to replace the current DSA test route, which would mean:

  • individual trainees would be assessed by recognised training organisations who have demonstrated the ability to assess
  • DSA would verify recognised training centres are delivering assessments to the required standard

This doesn’t worry me too much – but it has the usual agitators spitting feathers. Why?

Well, there has been talk of introducing a vocational qualification for some time – it would just be a recognised national qualification. What they’re saying is that the qualifying process would involve gaining this qualification. It’s the “recognised training organisations” part that is at the root of the concern, though.

Naturally, every card-carrying unionised ADI north of the River Trent will resent any “training organisation” being involved. That’s because they know it will likely end up being large national driving schools who are given this responsibility. The likes of the AA, BSM, Red, and so on. And that must be opposed by them at all costs – no matter how good an idea it is.

Absolutely the last thing we want is for every one-man outfit out there being a “recognised training organisation” – but denying such people that opportunity is the lifeblood of the typical union agitator, and it gives them something to rant about at meetings.

The DSA is supposed to be opening this up for consultation next year. If it ever happens – and that is far from certain – it won’t be for several years after that that it is introduced, and it will be a further several years before the first products of the system start teaching.

There is also an important sentence just before the I quoted section above. It says:

Options include:

And then goes on to list three topics, of which the above is just one. So the plan is not cut in stone, and the only ones who would be worried within the DSA are those who can see their jobs going at some point if it were introduced, hence the “leak” and the apparent concern of the whistle-blower involved.

My main concern is the second possible option, which involves only doing two manoeuvres instead of four during the Part 2 test to allow time for a “talk-through”. Why not do all four manoeuvres AND a talk-through, for crying out loud. Make the test harder, not easier.

Ban Elderly From Cemeteries?

14/11/2012
DOAADI
ADI, Bad Drivers, News

At the end of August I reported on a non-incident where a learner driver had accidentally damaged a headstone while driving through a cemetery. The local hyenas immediately called for learners to be banned from all cemeteries.

I note from the newsfeeds this latest example of headstone vandalism, where an elderly driver in his mid-70s attempted to manoeuvre his vehicle and ended up flattening someone’s monument. This one happened in Lancashire.

The local hyenas have not yet clamoured for the elderly – who are a far greater risk than learners in these locations – to be banned from cemeteries.  I won’t hold my breath.

(Note the tragedy surrounding Cassie McCord, also discussed previously.)

DSA Advice: Rules For Cyclists

14/11/2012
DOAADI
DSA, News, Training

The latest advice email from the DSA made me smile for various reasons:

You MUST NOT cycle on a pavement.

Rule 64

I think that is how you define “succinct”. It’s worth noting that the full Highway Code contains more rules and guidelines both for and about cyclists.

It also made me smile because with the recent news that our new national god and idol, Bradley Wiggins, had been knocked off his bike, you’d have thought the best place for cyclists to be would be off the road and on the pavement. After all, that’s where they go when they want to avoid stopping at traffic lights or bypass other traffic (and before that bunch of spandex-clad Scottish biker boys gets itself all wound up again, yes, that’s what most cyclists DO do).

Fortunately, Wiggins (and the national head coach, who was involved in a separate incident) will make a full recovery. But you have to ask what alternative fate might have befallen Wiggins if he hadn’t been riding on a main road in the dark, and during rush hour – and presumably a little faster than the average cyclist. And he didn’t do himself any favours with that middle-finger salute when he left hospital.

One thing that appears certain is that the woman driver who hit him is likely to get the book thrown at her, because our enforcement people have entered full-on, media-versus-anyone-who-ever-even-met-Jimmy-Saville mode over the incident (i.e. blame, blame, blame, blame).

Incidentally, I got a Police Caution Letter for riding on a pavement when I was at school. Then, the intervening years appeared to encourage people (children especially) to stay off roads because they’re dangerous. Then, when we entered our Green Period (characterised by all the Wiggins-wannabes clad in Spandex, with what appear to be walnuts shoved down their leggings as they cultivate their varicose veins), we all discover that Number One Priority on roads must be given to the pushbike.

Go figure.