{"id":13684,"date":"2013-08-24T23:28:39","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T22:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=13684"},"modified":"2013-08-24T23:28:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T22:28:39","slug":"red-driving-school-is-at-it-again-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=13684","title":{"rendered":"RED Driving School Is At It Again!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, I wrote an article after RED Driving School had \u201creleased research\u201d<\/a> that revealed the startling fact that young drivers think they\u2019re better drivers than their parents. RED\u2019s CEO said:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s good to see that young drivers are confident in their driving ability and believe that, because they\u2019re going through or have recently been through the driving tuition and test procedure, they\u2019re better placed to drive safely and competently.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So this new story makes interesting reading<\/a> \u2013 not least because it has appeared on every PR site imaginable, suggesting that the most important detail to someone somewhere concerns the use of \u201cRED\u201d in the title. Again, something as simple as playing around with a spread sheet and a data set that is in the public domain is touted as \u201cresearch\u201d. <\/p>\n

The reports are misleading because although they refer to the 17-24 year age group, it isn\u2019t clear if the data given refer to this group alone, or if they are for all motorists. Similarly, look at the table below \u2013 it apparently shows \u201caccident hotspots\u201d: <\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

I would just love someone to explain to me the Westminster entry. Apart from the question about why it is there at all, how the hell does it manage to get above Manchester except based on the lesser category of \u201cnumber of road accidents\u201d? Sure, this category is significant \u2013 but not in the context of the RED press release. For a location to have such a high number of accidents, but to buck the trend and have such small numbers of serious\/fatal incidents, is completely overlooked in the \u201cresearch\u201d. One way or another the Westminster data are both highly significant and highly suspect, which automatically casts doubt on all the other data..<\/p>\n

But RED\u2019s CEO chimes in with:<\/p>\n

\n

Many young people are seriously hurt or killed on our roads every year and it is self evident that reducing this carnage needs to be a key objective for both Government and the driver training industry. <\/p>\n

Research has shown that the majority of casualties in the UK are on urban roads. In 2010, a total of 98,550 casualties occurred on urban roads, with 6,500 on motorways.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Apart from stating the bleeding obvious, at no point does he explain HOW the driver training industry \u2013 or the Government, for that matter \u2013 is actually going to deal with it. The press release itself deals primarily with nonsense issues about how Manchester has made \u201cthe biggest improvement\u201d without identifying precisely how; and how Birmingham is the \u201cmost dangerous urban area foo young drivers\u201d without stating why. Surely, if Manchester had managed to identify, isolate, and bottle Miracle Ingredient Z-247 (read Catch-22 if you don\u2019t know what that is) then everyone would be buying it by the truckload. Councillor Nigel Murphy (from Manchester) tries to explain:<\/p>\n

\n

Over the last few years we have set up dozens of 20mph zones across Manchester and we have now revealed plans to make the city’s roads even safer. This includes the introduction of Dutch-style cycle paths and bus priority lanes on major routes into the city centre.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is complete, misinformed, political rubbish. Not one word of that in any way explains why Manchester has fallen from 1st to 10th in the rankings \u2013 it is just designed to milk to fact without understanding it. On that idiotic comment about cycle paths, any possible benefit will be completely smothered by the huge increase in the numbers of cyclists since last year \u2013 you simply cannot evaluate a change in one variable when lots of others are changing at the same time. Manchester\u2019s \u201cvictory\u201d results from comparing 2005 with 2011. A lot happened 9 years ago – and in the intervening 6 years – most of which had nothing to do with the current nonsense Nigel Murphy is rattling on about. And the effects of the Olympics and Tour de France (both in 2012 and 2013) have yet to be seen. This story certainly casts a lot of doubt on Manchester\u2019s ability<\/a> to stay at the bottom of the rankings once new data become available (43 accidents on just two roads over a period of about 18 months).. <\/p>\n

The simple fact is that although Manchester may have seen a 40% reduction in its casualty rate between 2005 and 2011, we\u2019re still talking about similar orders of magnitude in every city. Manchester\u2019s figures just aren\u2019t as appallingly bad as they were, that\u2019s all. <\/p>\n

The article also quotes RED (it doesn\u2019t say who, but probably the CEO again):<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026RED is offering enhanced lesson plans to help learner drivers not just to pass their driving test but also to be safer drivers during that critical newly-qualified phase.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, too, is complete rubbish. All driving instructors are self-employed and no driving school can guarantee that they will all be performing to the same standard. I pick up lots of pupils who have taken lessons with other instructors \u2013 independents, local schools, and national ones (RED included) \u2013 who have certainly not experienced the \u201cenhanced\u201d lessons RED\u2019s CEO is talking about. \u201cSafe Driving For Life\u201d is the DSA\u2019s strapline, and ALL driving instructors should be teaching in accordance with that. If some aren\u2019t, then unless the driving school whose name they operate under is very selective in who they take on (and most simply require a Green Badge and signs of life) they will be distributed across the entire spectrum. <\/p>\n

If you\u2019re still in doubt, another PR story came in at the same time<\/a> \u2013 again involving RED. It refers to a deal between RED and an insurance company whereby:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026a 5% discount [is given] to all new drivers who have had 10 or more hours of professional tuition with RED Driving School. For the average 17 year-old customer, this represents a saving of around \u00a3100 on their annual premium.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This raises a huge number of questions of an ethical nature. To start with, 10 hours of lessons is not going to change how someone drives \u2013 even if the instructors were recruited straight from Mount Olympus and are fed on an exclusive diet of Ambrosia, with the threat of transfer to Hades should any of their pupils ever be involved in an accident. So is it right to offer insurance based on this? <\/p>\n

But you also have to ask how much the average new driver is being ripped off by in the first place, when meeting such a simplistic goal is going to get you a \u00a3100 discount from a named insurer? In any case, in my experience those offering discounts are usually charging more than the rest in the first place, so there really is no discount that couldn\u2019t be obtained by shopping around. <\/p>\n

But the biggest question has to be how RED can make all those statements about \u201creducing this carnage\u201d when it has signed a deal with an insurance company to offer cheaper insurance to drivers if they simply take a few lessons with it. It hardly seems to be a positive move towards road safety, and rather more focused on marketing. <\/p>\n

Oh, yeah. And RED\u2019s \u201cresearch\u201d isn\u2019t research. Nor are current accident statistics going to be influenced (i.e. reduced) by driving instructors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, I wrote an article after RED Driving School had \u201creleased research\u201d that revealed the startling fact that young drivers think they\u2019re better drivers than their parents. RED\u2019s CEO said: \u201cIt\u2019s good to see that young drivers are confident in their driving ability and believe that, because they\u2019re going through or have recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,87,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-news","category-training"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}