{"id":15820,"date":"2014-10-15T08:35:27","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T07:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=15820"},"modified":"2014-10-15T08:35:27","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T07:35:27","slug":"hazard-perception-test-wins-safety-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=15820","title":{"rendered":"Hazard Perception Test Wins Safety Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was written in June, and the “vipers’\u00a0comments” I referred to relate to those I read on various forums at that time. However, I notice the subject has cropped up again recently.<\/p>\n

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This came in via the DVSA email alerts, and it reports that the Hazard Perception Test (HPT) has won the John Smart Road Safety award at this years\u2019 Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT) awards. As you can imagine, this has caused a few of the usual vipers out there to burst out of their holes and start flinging their favoured lines around.\"Doing<\/p>\n

The award was primarily for the study and the\u00a0effort that went into it\u00a0– not for the simple process of sitting in front of a computer screen for 90 minutes in order to complete the Theory Test.<\/p>\n

For anyone who is interested, a \u201ccohort study\u201d is a complex analytical method used in situations where things aren\u2019t just black or white. For example, the human body is extremely complex, and so are most drugs, and a particular drug might not affect everyone in the same way, or it might have unwanted side effects which only show up in some people. It isn\u2019t simply a case of being able to say \u201cwell, he took the drug and it didn\u2019t affect him, therefore the problem isn\u2019t with the drug\u201d. A cohort study can help pin down the cause by looking at groups of people and data which apply to them. Unfortunately, such studies involve statistics, and most ADIs are self-proclaimed anti-experts on this subject – often summed up on web forums when someone posts their favourite mantra that there are \u201clies, damned lies, and statistics\u201d.<\/p>\n

And they wonder why no one – including the DVSA – wants to listen to them!<\/p>\n

Learning to drive – and driving safely thereafter – is also a hugely complex issue. It simply cannot be broken down into something as simple as what, for example,\u00a0happens when you mix two different colours of paint! For that reason, two cohort studies have been carried out – Cohort I covered the period 1988-1998, and Cohort II covered the period 1998-2007<\/a>. The second study straddled the introduction of the HPT in 2002.<\/p>\n

You can read the full findings for yourselves, but key points were:<\/p>\n