…more than half of people aged over 70 in Britain currently holds a driving licence and the number of elderly drivers will increase over the coming decade.
…The Foundation says larger lettering should be used on safety-critical signs including directions, and those telling motorists to stop and give way, so that elderly motorists can read them more easily.
OK. So what we’re saying is that the solution to older drivers and their failing faculties is… encourage them to drive by making signs and road markings bigger? How very eco-friendly. How safe for everyone else.
Hollywood
It’s funny, but on a Pass Plus lesson last week I started thinking how large the signs and lettering are on motorway signs.
But it appears that a 1 metre high letter ‘A’ isn’t big enough for someone who has failing eyesight, if the RAC is to be believed.
So how big should the letters be? Two metres? Twenty? Perhaps the answer the RAC is looking for lies across the pond? Can you imagine huge letters mounted in fields and on hillsides?
Somehow, “Accrington” and “Milton Keynes” don’t have the same ring as “Hollywood”. But the report goes on to say:
Fatal accidents involving older drivers generally occur in daylight, at junctions and at low speeds. Interacting with other traffic at junctions is the main risk for older drivers, particularly when turning right across traffic.
I’m sorry, but this is laughable – or would be if it wasn’t so sad. The automatic conclusion to be drawn is not larger road signs.
If they want to increase the lettering size for everyone, that’s a different matter. But just increasing it for people who can’t see… I’m sorry, but someone somewhere isn’t thinking straight.
How people drive is what counts (whether through age or something else). An older person unable to negotiate junctions at low speed is as bad – if not worse – than a chav doing it at high speed. Especially if it kills someone.
EDIT 15/04/2010: As if to prove what the real problem is, I was driving along the A453 today – near to the Crusader island – where it’s a 40mph limit with busy, but free-flowing, traffic. A silver VW Polo (reg. no. FL09 BXK) pulled out from the petrol station to turn right, right in front of me and into a gap that was the safe limit for me. He forced me to brake sharply – a lot of other people wouldn’t have reacted in time. Half a mile later he stopped – again, in the free-flowing traffic – to flash someone to turn into the Trent University campus. And yes, it was an old driver.
Earlier this week I had a pupil on test. He’s a good driver.
So, he drives off and – 40 minutes later – arrives back at the test centre. I’ve seen him coming up the driveway, so I collect my magazine, throw my cup in the bin, and head outside.
As usual, I walk slowly towards the parked car so the examiner can either wave me over or not. The door opens (not a good sign) and I’m waved over. The examiner has got his head in his hands:
I can’t believe you did that.
Examiner
I asked what had happened, and the examiner told me. It turns out my pupil had got two faults up to that point. But when they came into the car park the examiner asked him to pull into a bay – head first, not as the reverse park manoeuvre – and he didn’t stop in time and bumped into the crash barrier at the back!
The examiner was almost lost for words, and just said several times: “I can’t believe it”. He added at the end, shaking his head and looking for the right things to say:
You can obviously drive [a nice line: I taught him from scratch], so just book your test again. If anything, you were a little harsh with some of your braking sometimes [he wasn’t marked down for any of that] – but when it mattered you didn’t do it hard enough! I just don’t know what to say. It has to be a fail because it could have been another car or a pedestrian.
Examiner
Depending on how you look at it, it was a good debrief (all the Nottingham examiners are decent people and say it like it is).
I could have killed him (my pupil, that is).
As I was driving him home – and bear in mind he is a Chelsea supporter, so he wasn’t going to get away without a major ribbing over it – he eventually asked:
So, if I hadn’t have done that I’d have passed?
I replied:
Yes. Yes. YES. That’s the whole point. If you hadn’t have hit the barrier, you’d be sitting there with a Pass Certificate. You only got two faults, which is very good.
He started slapping himself, which saved me the trouble.
There’s no damage to the car. But this guy is one of those people you just know you’re going to stay in contact with after he passes (even if it’s just texting insults to each other about the football results).
I noticed this story on the BBC website today, about a learner who had an accident on a lesson and flipped the car. My first thought was for the occupants.
True to form, though, this does not appear to be the first thought which has occurred to many other instructors out there. Some know-it-alls wonder “what the instructor was doing at the time “. Others suggest that “CPD is urgently required “.
I would just like to point out to these “experts” that when someone rear ends you (and many of these “experts” have been rear-ended, or worse) because you or your pupil stops suddenly, although it is their fault for insurance purposes, it is really you or your learner’s fault, in large part, for stopping so abruptly in the first place.
So whatever it was which led to the BSM car having an accident like this is just another example of one of the many things which can go wrong when you are an instructor. It’s not a reason to start saying bad things about BSM or the other ADI (not unless you have a bit of an inflated opinion of yourself, anyway).
I should also point out that a pupil told me today she’d been involved in an incident several years ago, which resulted in rolling the car, and that she had ended up with severe concussion. It can happen to anyone.
BSM’s statement has led to more criticism:
We have spoken to the learner driver who is fine and is already hoping to book her next lesson with us soon.
The instructor responded calmly, professionally and swiftly, and is back on the road in a new car.
The Wise Ones believe that BSM is just plugging itself at the pupil’s expense, when in fact they are trying to point out that the pupil was fine and not put off by the incident. What else are they going to say, for crying out loud?
Speaking personally, over the years I’ve had a couple of gentle rear-end shunts (no damage), one burst tyre (driving straight at a very high kerb when parking outside her house), and – my worst one – reversing into a high wall on the turn in the road exercise by hitting the gas instead of the brake and lifting the clutch up (I stopped him in time for there to be no damage to the car, but only just).
But I could have had a whole lot more: pupils trying to turn right on to roundabouts, suddenly deciding to go left when indicating right (and vice versa), suddenly deciding to go left or right when in the straight-ahead lane, suddenly deciding to emergency stop for the dead squirrel (or, in one case, “horse poo”) in the road, not preparing to stop for the squadron of old ladies on the crossing just in front of us, a dyspraxic pupil suddenly steering left on a dead straight road (“I have no idea why I did that”), another dyspraxic almost climbing into the footwell to look at the gear stick when turning left on a bend, with a 20 foot ditch next to us, in heavy rain, in pitch dark, and with another car waiting to emerge, and so on. The list is almost infinite.
No one’s perfect, and if a pupil does something totally unexpected, any instructor is likely to be caught out eventually. This unfortunate ADI was – and it has nothing to do with him being with BSM, nor does it put into question his abilities as an ADI.
The driver, aged in her 20s, lost control after she locked the steering wheel to the right and stamped on the accelerator pedal as she left a junction.
Instead of sedately joining the road the brand new black Fiat 500 performed a high-speed u-turn straight into a garden gate.
The householder whose gate it was adds more information:
She had the steering wheel on full lock and accelerated.
The car effectively performed a u-turn and drove up my garden gate before quite gracefully landing upside down on my drive.
But the comments to the bottom of that story by the usual troglodytes are no better than the ones I’ve already referred to.
EDIT 26/05/2010: I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but there appears to be a lot of very unpleasant people around if the search terms used to find this post are anything to go by. Anyone who hates BSM as much as some appear to do, without having actually ever been franchised to them, ought to seek medical advice urgently before they succumb to their own venom!
I’m getting a lot of hits on this search term at the moment. Not a big surprise, really, given the total hash the Councils are making of all roadworks in Nottingham since the start of the year.
In Ruddington, along the A60, they decided that all the bus stops needed the kerb raising by a few centimetres. No doubt, this is so that the thousands upon thousands of wheelchairs and pushchairs who use the buses in Ruddington each day can get on and off more easily. Naturally, it was a case of “sod the motorist” over the months it took them to modify the dozen or so stops, with idiotic road closures and whole weeks with little or no attempt to complete the work – and which, naturally, overran by weeks.
I would point out that the average bus driver is incapable of stopping within 2 metres of a specific target even under test conditions, and when you have people pratting about with shopping and pushchairs on board it is even less likely. Around here, they also frequently stop wherever they bloody well want (picking up their mates outside one of the City depots at traffic lights, or dropping people off “nearer to home” – even if it IS blocking the road when they do it).
Also in Ruddington, they are due to commence – or I should say “re-commence” – work near to the Wilford Road/Clifton Road junction. So far, they have widened a footpath (just in case any passing 747s might need it to do an emergency landing), erected a load of posts with those segregated pedestrian and cycle route signs for the local residents to park in between (half on the pavement and half off), and for cyclists to ignore totally in their ongoing quest to cause hold ups to traffic during rush hour, and partially dug up the existing pedestrian islands at the end of Clifton Road. A big yellow sign warns of impending chaos starting on Monday, I think.
And then – at the moment – there is yet another gas leak at the end of Kirk Lane, where it crosses the A60 on to Flawforth Lane. This must be the fourth or fifth leak in as many years in that exact same spot. It is slap in the middle of the crossroads – ironically, resulting in the same four-way traffic control the councils had in for a week when they recently repainted about 10 metres of lines along the A60. The gas people appear to be ex-Council workers, because once they’d erected the lights yesterday, then stood around in groups of three (tch! Health & Safety, eh?) holding those electronic gas sniffers (they’d identified the gas leak last week and put cones up, and been down a manhole), they packed up and went home well before 2.30pm and left the chaos (and traffic lights) behind.
EDIT 13/04/2010: I drove down the A60 early this afternoon and it is bloody gridlocked on all four roads. So much so that rather than come back that way, I took a detour through Gotham. Surely there must be some legislation that says these people have to fix faults quickly? Because there should be.
EDIT 15/04/2010: They’ve still got the 4-way lights in as of 2pm this afternoon, and a small digger – so it looks like it won’t be fixed this week. This has been going on for the whole week already (the leak was first ‘visited’ this time last week).
I went to pick a pupil up from Tollerton this evening and the knock-on effect is that the junction of Main Road in Plumtree with the A606 is also virtually gridlocked – it’s not easy to get out of there at the best of times, especially to turn right towards Cotgrave, and people were taking big risks. Basically, the only way to avoid the roadworks is to take a very long detour or just get stuck in heavier traffic (actually, both those things). And at 8pm tonight they were not doing any work, but the lights are still up.
It’s appalling that National Grid are allowed to get away with this.
EDIT 18/04/2010: Went that way tonight and they are finished. At last.
EDIT 29/04/2010: I’m still getting a lot of hits for this. There are still roadworks in Ruddington around Wilford Road, but these are to do with resurfacing the road and farting about with the pavements (putting in “pedestrian peninsulas” – I just made that term up – and widening them so that cyclists of the prattus spandexius variety will have more space to ignore as they cause hold-ups during rush hour). To be fair, the delays due to the works are minimal, so I wouldn’t worry about them. They aren’t far away from finishing, by the looks of things.
EDIT 04/05/2010: Still getting a lot of hits for this, which makes me think I must be missing something! The resurfacing work around the Wilford Road/Clifton Road is almost finished and isn’t causing too many delays (far fewer than those elderly drivers – or the mentally impaired owner of that mini-supermarket – who insist on parking on yellow lines right on the corner of Easthorpe Street/Church Street and causing a total blockage). There are also roadworks on the A60 in Bunny during the day, with delays dependent on the volume of traffic (these are down to Le Cirque Du Nottingham County Council putting in a driveway to a field they appear to have given planning permission for building on. As usual for them, a task which ought to take a couple of days has “at least three weeks” written all over it). Thankfully, since it is the council handling it, work starts late mornings and ceases very early in the afternoon, so disruption is minimal.
EDIT 05/05/2010: They’re also doing some resurfacing work on the A60 between the Nottingham Knight island and Kirk Lane – but only in the evenings. This is scheduled to last two weeks. Was there tonight and you need to be careful coming off the roundabout because the way it is being managed is resulting in congestion back on to it.
EDIT 17/05/2010: Still getting hits for this. The resurfacing between the Nottingham Knight and Kirk Lane appears to be over and done with. Not a bad job, either, with congestion restricted to evenings and weekends.
They still appear to have some lines to paint (and some footpaths to put chicanes into) on Wilford Road towards the Golf Club, but this isn’t causing any congestion at all during the day – and I go through there quite a lot.
The gateway they were installing in Bunny appears almost complete, and no sign of the totally unnecessary (it was Le Cirque du County Council, after all) temporary lights and lane closures for the last week. God help us when they start doing whatever it is they’re going to do on that field, though.
EDIT 19/05/2010: Spoke too soon! The bloody road is up outside the petrol station, and temporary lights are installed. Absolute chaos coming towards Nottingham from Bunny at 4.30pm this afternoon. And they were doing something at the Kirk Lane lights (again) yesterday (down to one lane). Looked like something to do with the light sensors, but no doubt it will disturb the gas line under there, and we’ll have another leak before long.
You really do have to keep a straight face sometimes.
I keep hearing from one particular instructor that he is “ready to pack it in”, waiting for calls because “the phone has gone dead”, furious that pupils have cancelled a lesson (and that it happens all the time and they are unreliable), struggling to pay bills because “work has dried up”, and so on. But now he is claiming that he is happy doing “40 hours a week tuition Monday to Friday”. I wish he’d make his bloody mind up, because two weeks ago he was moaning about not having any work.
You hear this kind of bilge all the time at the test centre. In this particular case, even if he is doing 2 hour lessons with 15 minutes in between (so all his pupils are living within a few miles of each other), that tots up to being out of the house for at least 10 hours a day without any break whatsoever (or longer if he does have a break). Factor in pupils who do 1 or 1½ hour lessons and you can add another hour a day at least.
More to the point, assuming his pupils are happy to be told exactly when their lesson times begin (which is bound to put some of them off, and which simply doesn’t happen in this job if you want to be successful at it), having to cut lessons right on time all the time is also going to be a turn off for many of them (particularly when there are traffic problems and other hold ups). Most of this guy’s lesson time must be spent working out how to finish bang on schedule! I don’t see how you can possibly give value for money with such constraints. I mean, just imagine first of all trying to reliably fit lessons in with only 15 minutes in between them. Then imagine how tired you’d be doing so many continuous hours. It just isn’t going to happen like that.
It simply doesn’t make sense, and it would certainly explain some of the other claims you see from people about having no work and being ready to throw in the towel if it is true.
So there’s a bit of advice to any prospective instructors: you provide a service to the pupil, not the other way round.
I think it’s back up again now, but the DSA’s new test booking system went down last week.
The Militant Tendency wasted no time in attacking the DSA and deriding the new system.
In actual fact, the breakdown was due to fire and flooding at a BT telephone exchange which cut the link between the DSA’s system and the banking side of things.
I normally have Windows set to automatically install updates, but for some reason I just had a quick look to see if any were pending.
There was one.
It is listed as an “Important Update”, so it would have been automatically installed tonight. It is described as providing a browser choice for EEA users – explained in greater detail here. In a nutshell, the idiots in Brussels have argued that including Internet Explorer with the Windows Operating System is anti-competitive and have forced Microsoft you provide this bloody update which gives you a choice – via an add-on – that you always had anyway.
It is worth pointing out that when I worked in tech support, one of the many, many potential problems users could create for themselves (apart from buying a Mac) was installing software simply because they could. Browsers were no exception – you’d get some middle-aged comedian (on more than one occasion, various of my relatives have fallen into this category) who decided he was an expert, and who’d read that it was cool to hate Microsoft, install Firefox or Opera, and then not be able to use his antiquated machine which hadn’t had a clean install since Windows 95 was first released.
Anyway, I am perfectly happy with Internet Explorer, so I right-clicked the update and chose to “hide” it. I am presuming that it will remain hidden (and completely uninstalled) unless I choose to “unhide” it and install it.
I was looking at where some of my traffic had come from and one of them tracked back to another driving instructor’s blog ( Martin’s Driving). Martin appears to be a Scottish ADI operating under the BSM franchise.
As I think I have said in more than one post on here, I quite like the FIAT 500 – I think it’s cute, and I like the retro styling.
FIAT 500 - Old and New
One of the criticisms levelled at the FIAT is that it is a “girlie” car – indeed, BSM made it clear that the majority of its pupils were young females and that it would target this group specifically. You can’t blame it (well, you can if you are a fossil, masquerading as an ADI and working under the BSM franchise and used to using Corsas).
Barbie's FIAT 500
But this made me smile.
On Martin’s website, he has this photograph… a Barbie accessory, and unmistakably a FIAT 500!
Martin suggests that people have stopped calling the 500 a “Noddy car” and are now calling it a “Barbie car” – but he says they are wrong, because Barbie’s is white.
Actually, a hell of a lot of BSM’s 500s are white. Even the picture showing the old and new models side by side confirms that white is definitely in the range (personally, I hate the muddy brown one).
Something else I have mentioned before is the hypocrisy of some ADIs. They revel in criticising the 500 – and yet they teach in Yarises, Matizes, and all manner of joke cars you’d expect to see a clown climbing out of.
Another email alert from the DSA linking to this part of their website .
Our aim in publishing these Standards is to contribute to DSA’s overall objective of reducing the number of people who are killed and seriously injured on our roads by describing good practice in the field of driver training as well as providing a benchmark for performance in underpinning lifelong driver development.
I think there is more to it than just this, though. I am pretty certain that this is going to be used – at least in part – for the driving test at some point in the not too distant future.
If you look at the Safe And Responsible Driving (Cat B) section, then look at Role 1, and then (for example), Unit 1.3 Plan A Journey, you will see:
Unit 1.3 - Plan A Journey
Trust me – this is remarkably like the documentation which covers TEC awards, so you can see where it might lead. The word they have used that gives it away is “underpinning” – it was much beloved by the TEC administrators I had to deal with in my previous employment.
For all my dislike of TEC certification in my previous job (it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, and failure was impossible), if the DSA use this properly – and if they make sure failure is recognised as such – then it could have a positive effect on driving standards in future. Of course, it would also have to be compulsory – but I can’t see anyone having the guts to do that.
There was one.
