Advanced-Driving.co.uk – the UK’s most popular website for safe road driving, condemns the recent Government guidance to Councils to reduce the speed limit on many rural roads to 50mph. Why? Because it’s not roads that are dangerous but poorly trained drivers.
Lowering speed limits is an easy but ill-conceived and ultimately ineffective solution to tackling casualties. The wrong thinking also has no end. Why 50mph? Why not 40mph, or even 30mph?
The authorities know that most casualties occur below the posted speed limit on a given road. Trying to reduce casualties with speed limits alone would, therefore, need them to be set and rigidly enforced at levels that interfere with reasonable mobility.
Official figures also show that ‘exceeding the speed limit’ is reported by the Police as a contributing factor in only 7% of accidents for drivers aged 17-19, and less than 2% for drivers aged over 25 who form the majority of road-users (1).
Declaring more of our safe driving to be illegal is a weak and unthinking step for genuine road safety.
There is considerable concern over the ongoing proliferation of the Speed Kills campaign. This policy is continuing to create a population of drivers who do not know how to determine what a safe speed is for a given road or situation.
For more than a decade, Speed Kills has been teaching people, including millions of new drivers, that just keeping to the speed limit will keep them safe. This is a dangerous form of ‘zombie’ driving, meaning people focus much more on their speedometer as an indicator for safety, rather than the real hazards going on around them.
Advanced-Driving.co.uk is passionate about good safe driving, and believes that setting speed limits too low works against safety. It causes frustration in the average, responsible driver and focuses the driver’s mind on an arbitrary number (the limit) rather than encouraging good judgement of the speed which is safe for the conditions.
Sometimes even 30mph can be too fast for a rural road, whereas 60mph may be appropriate if the conditions are right for that road. Safety will always depend more on the circumstances than the posted limit.
The Government should be providing better driver training to stop the decline in driving ability. There are simple and teachable skills that would make drivers more aware of risk, give better control of hazards and improve the ability to select a correct and safe speed, yet these skills are not being taught.
It is also not only ‘young drivers’ who are let down by their training and the over-emphasis on speed. Crash figures show that ALL ‘new drivers’ irrespective of age have high crash rates – until they start to overcome for themselves the shortcomings in what they have been taught. Clearly, new drivers improve with experience, but this should not excuse inadequate training for learner drivers from day one (2).
Advanced-Driving.co.uk calls on the Government to abandon the simplistic and distracting focus on ‘speed’, and use the next decade to concentrate on tackling the fundamental failures in driver training to really improve road safety in the UK.
References:
1) DFT Road Safety Research Report No.87 Learning to Drive: The Evidence. Figure 5.5: Proportion of drivers in accidents with factors attributable to the driver, by age group of driver, 2006
2) DFT Road Safety Research Report No.87 Learning to Drive: The Evidence. Figure 1.1: The effects of age (maturation) and experience on accident liability
Jackie Willis, a driving instructor and founder/director of Care Motoring, a Norfolk-based driving school, has come up with an innovative new way to help learner drivers beat the credit crunch by learning to drive with the help of a parent, or other qualified driver, together with a series of audio lessons, delivered by Jackie and called Virtual Driving Instructor.
“Many learner drivers have either put off learning to drive altogether, or are taking lessons with a driving instructor, but can only afford to pay for them once every 2 or 3 weeks, sometimes longer. If they are lucky, they will have the chance to practise in between, but sadly many do not,” said Jackie
According to a recent survey from an insurance company, applications to have learner drivers added to parents’ policies has increased by around 23% and it is this group of learner drivers that Virtual Driving Instructor is targeting. A survey by Churchill insurance in 2007 showed how much damage can actually be done when parents attempt to teach their children.
Virtual Driving Instructor takes away the responsibility of what to teach and how to teach it from the unqualified instructor, by ‘instructing’ the learner through these audio lessons. Jackie explains:
“The parent, or other supervising driver, and the learner, listen together before going off and practising, as instructed in the audio lesson. They then stop again after this practise and listen for further advice. And of course, if the instructions have not been fully understood first time, then the audio can be rewound and listened to again”.
Certainly the lessons seem to be very thorough. There are 25 in all, which includes 5 manoeuvres lessons, and each lesson is accompanied by a set of lesson notes to help the supervising driver. Each lesson contains the instructions for the skill being practised, encouragement for the learner to assess their own progress and set their own targets for improvement, risk management techniques, Highway Code references relevant to that lesson, and links to various websites for additional help and information, as well as recommended reading material.
As Jackie, an experienced teacher and classroom practitioner, points out, whatever a person is learning, success is achieved quickest and best when the subject can be learned through visual, auditory and kinaesthetic means. So, in the case of learning to drive, watching training videos and good role-model drivers, coupled with listening regularly to the audio lessons and getting as much driving practice as possible, will lead to accelerated learning which is of a much higher standard.
It is also recommended that the learner backs up this ‘diy’ training with some lessons with a ‘real’ driving instructor, who may then be able to focus their training on higher level skills, producing novice drivers who possess advanced driving skills as soon as they obtain their driving licence.
This was to have been an article about the false beliefs that live in the minds of young people and obstruct their path to safe driving. But that will have to wait a while.
Discussion with instructors and drivers has brought to the surface one single belief that casts such a long shadow that it merits separate attention. Especially now, as the Driving Standards Agency is considering major reforms in driver training. This belief has been uttered by so many people for so long that it seems to just exist. Surprisingly though, its damaging effect comes not from it being false, but because it is so true.
The Stubborn Truth
It is of course, the relentless old adage, “You really learn to drive after passing the test”. This saying has been nestling deep in our driving culture for so many decades that we no longer see it as a nonsense and a verdict of failure. Instead, it just sits heavy as a lead weight astride the process of learning to drive.
But why do people say it anyway? There are two main ‘proofs’ in the public mind. First, novice drivers have a notorious and persistently high crash rate. And by definition, if we are unhappy with the carnage, then drivers are not being well prepared for being set free on the roads. Second and much stronger, is that ‘test driving’ is so totally different from the ‘real-world driving’ that ambushes novices after passing the test.
So learners will often hear this maxim said. From their peers, friends and family – especially when having private practice. Instructors might also make comments that distinguish between driving before and after the test. But most powerful is the shock that novices get as they suddenly drive without supervision.
Unfortunately, none of the changes made to driver training over the years have managed to dent this Stubborn Truth. It persists as true today, and entrenched in the public mind, as it ever was.
From the viewpoint of the learners, we should expect them to feel confused. How can they accept that the act of passing the test has the effect of throwing them headlong into the highest risk category of driver? Why would anyone create a situation like that? Predictably, they prefer to imagine that crashes happen to drivers who choose to be deliberately reckless – this seems to make much more sense. But in reality, things go wrong across the full spectrum of novices – including the ones who want to be safe.
Let’s look at the effect that this maxim has on the learning process.
Consequences
Some recent research adds to our insight into the driving minds of young people, and especially how sceptical they are of the learning process (1) . We know that many believe that passing the test has little to do with actual competence, and a lot of their thinking is a vivid reflection of the Stubborn Truth:
Learning to drive is about passing the test - “The test is an obstacle to being allowed to drive, so I want to get through it as soon as possible.”
Preparing for the test does not teach ‘real’ driving – “Apparently I have to pick that up afterwards, and just hope not to crash in the process.”
Pre-test training is irrelevant to good driving - “After the test I can forget the unnecessary things and drive how I think it should be done.”
Driving ability is a matter of ‘natural talent’ - “If this is all they teach, then the rest must be down to whether you’ve just got the talent or not.”
Passing the test has a lot to do with luck – “I want to try the test as soon as I have a chance of scraping through, and hope nothing tricky happens on the day.”
Crashes are inevitable – “We’re bound to make mistakes with so much more to learn after the test.”
Alongside the clear implications for safety, there are broader consequences in this picture too:
There are strong signals that many new drivers, especially young males, quickly feel they know more about driving than the system that taught them. This is a critical condition, but not surprising.
There is a bias against instructors who want to raise the game. Trying to lift a pupil above being able to just pass the test can be akin to defying gravity. There might also be accusations of ‘unnecessary’ lessons. Many instructors bow to the pressure for a quick pass, simply to keep the client happy.
For most people, the Stubborn Truth is a major part of the reputation of the driving instructor industry, and it works to undermine the value that they feel is being provided.
Any negative views that new drivers hold about their pre-test training are likely to also rub off onto their respect for road safety more generally. For most of them it all comes from the same source. And a lack of faith and trust is natural if the training system is failing to deliver what it should.
Realistically, new drivers will always have a lot to learn from their experience after the test. But the problem lies in the scale of what is left untaught. This huge vacuum also gives grounds for the ‘talent model’ of good driving to arise, which denies the role of training, but will continue to thrive until it is proved to be wrong.
All of this means that if the magnitude of novice casualties is unacceptable, then in the same breath so too must be the existence of the Stubborn Truth and its consequences.
What are novices learning?
A strong image of new drivers taking to the road is that they are more likely to crash than the rest of us. But something very successful happens there too.
Their risk of crashing falls very sharply during the initial two years of driving (2) , and this raises a vital question. How do they do that? What exactly are they learning by themselves that makes this happen? Asking them does not help much. Even experienced drivers struggle to explain what is really going on when they drive, so it is impractical to expect sparkling insights from our novices.
Let’s look first at some common assumptions that are actually not responsible for this effect:
Just experience: We have a long tradition of saying that novices simply ‘gain experience’. This lets us hide behind the dubious claim that, “You can’t teach experience”. There may be some comfort in keeping the responsibility weighted towards the novice, but complaining at them while leaving them stranded helps no one. And ‘gaining experience’ is too vague to have any meaning.
Better car control: The weight given to physical control for the test can give the impression that this must be the thing to continue improving afterwards, but this is not the answer. Most learners master vehicle control quite easily to the level required for public roads, and novices do not start avoiding crashes with extreme physical actions. This is also not how experienced drivers stay safe either.
Motorways, darkness and bad weather: There are advocates of rolling into the pre-test stage what are effectively some of the Pass Plus modules – motorways, driving in the dark and driving in poor conditions. However, official studies have found a lack of evidence that Pass Plus reduces a driver’s crash risk (3). It seems unlikely therefore that gaining this sort of experience on their own could result in a sharp increase in novice safety.
Better attitudes and behaviour: A definite surprise in recent research is that key behaviours get slightly but steadily worse during the first three years of driving (4). This is about specific ‘driving violations’ and ‘hazard involvement’ that have been linked to crash liability. Clearly, these behaviours are vital to safety, but improving them is not a route that novices are using to help themselves.
So what are novices doing? The answer is that by being forced to think for themselves, they are beginning to manage risk. With the safety net of a supervising driver being suddenly removed, the brain gets quite a jolt. Decisions are now truly life-and-death events, and a deep instinct kicks in to cope with the new danger.
Linking with the debate on frontal lobe development, we could even say that novices are beginning to exercise and develop this vital area of brain function – and perhaps after years of under-use in childhood.
In some chaotic fashion specific skills are being gained which are about hazard control – making risk safe. And this is how novices achieve the falling crash curve. Crucially, though, this area of competence on the road is currently neglected in learner training, and this is the core weakness that creates the casualties.
Reform of driver training
Declaring the Stubborn Truth to be unacceptable is long overdue. As well as being a severe criticism of our training regime, it is in itself an active barrier to raising standards. The expectation of weak training leads people to behave in ways that also cause it to come true, such as treating the test as just an obstacle.
It is worth noting too that the idea of placing restrictions on novice drivers (on passengers, night driving, etc), would serve to reinforce the maxim, and appear to mark an unhelpful surrender to poor training.
How could this barrier be removed? The obvious answer is to start teaching learners what the novices are picking up on their own. And this is no longer as difficult as it was before, because the problem and the solution are now better understood. The hurdle today is in making the decision to update the training.
From the new driver’s perspective, we should recognise that:
They have a deep sense themselves that ’something important’ is missing from their training. But they struggle to explain what they mean by ‘real driving’ or to define ‘good driving’. This is precisely what they have not been told about, and they rightly expect the trainers to have the answers.
Novices get no meaningful guidance about their period of self-learning after the test – what it should contain or how to do it. This ensures a process of experimental trial-and-error.
The ‘real world’ post-test experience should be a smooth continuation of their test preparation. The feeling that going solo involves a daunting disconnection is a critical symptom.
When pupils blame failing the test on bad luck and factors beyond their control, it shows that they cannot imagine how to take more responsibility for the result. And this is because they have not been given the skills that would let them do so.
Young people have a genuine appetite for learning how things really work. It captivates them in the task, and they normally welcome the opportunity. In driving, they want the real skills to be explained. The joy of learning is a natural and powerful energy of youth, unless we press it out of them.
Taking the training point of view, we must stop pretending, and realise that many of the key skills that experience builds can most definitely be taught. Introducing even three topics into pre-test tuition would dramatically reduce novice risk and the disconnection in post-test driving:
Mental skills – explain why safety is mainly about using mental skills. Describe how these skills work alongside the traditional focus on vehicle control and the Highway Code to achieve real, good and safe driving. This extends far beyond proposals to introduce training on ‘attitude’.
Risk management - teach the active control of danger. Use a realistic model of how risk behaves and can be controlled (such as the Speed, Surprise, Space model). The current Hazard Perception Test falls far short of this, but could be developed to make a much better connection to real driving. Using a practical structure for their thinking also simplifies the driver’s task and helps avoid overload.
Learning from experience - teach pupils how to learn from their experience. This is a skill in its own right, and is readily teachable to improve the speed and usefulness of learning. Vitally, it places the mechanism for lifelong learning within the drivers themselves. Most drivers, of all ages, waste their experience by only learning (if at all) from obvious severe events, such as crashes or near-misses.
These are some of the critical ‘revelations’ that new drivers are struggling to work out for themselves in a stumbling voyage of discovery. But drivers should be using these tools and skills from the start, not trying to reinvent them. If they were properly taught, it is even possible that new drivers could be safer than the current average on the road. And that would really change the reputation of the training system!
In conclusion
Today, the most important thing about the Stubborn Truth is that it could be removed. It should no longer, therefore, be shrugged off or ignored out of discomfort or momentum. In the total strategy for road safety, this deep-seated maxim describes a cavernous hole below the waterline that really should be plugged. Along with the casualty figures, it stands as a clear beacon of failure.
It is time to take responsibility for what feeds this public perception, and to stop regarding it as inevitable. Genuinely breaking this belief sits at the heart of what we should set out to achieve.
Yes, it is a bold ambition, but a necessary and overdue one. And only by accepting the explicit objective will it stand a chance of getting done. The Driving Standards Agency must square up to this relic of history, and recognise the deadly omissions in training. The missing safety skills could be taught, and making a start should be an urgent aim as they define the new training syllabus.
Continuing to withhold the skills of safe driving is simply neglect. It is already illogical to blame novices as generally as we do for their crashes. Our anguish of not knowing what else to do no longer makes sense.
The industry’s vision of “Safe Driving for Life” is an unattainable mirage for as long as people continue to say, “You really learn to drive after passing the test”.
There are some reckless young tearaways on our roads for whom there is no excuse. Many of them cast their mayhem wider into a criminal lifestyle.
Fortunately they are few, and most young drivers are not like that. The vast majority of them want to be safe. But even these youngsters then still crash far more than the rest of us. Sometimes they make tragic headlines of multiple deaths.
As adults, it is tempting to seek in every crash a way to just ‘blame the kids’, and perhaps begin to wonder whether they should be allowed to drive at all. But there are specific handicaps that we, as adults, give to young drivers which increase their crash risk and contribute to the carnage that disturbs us.
This is not to say we should find excuses for the novices who crash – they need to be encouraged to take more responsibility for themselves, not less. But along with this, and more importantly, we can not expect to reduce the problem if we deny the part that adults play in causing it. No matter how horrific the symptoms may be, we should not be blind to the underlying causes.
Along the complex and confusing journey that young people have into modern adulthood, the ability to drive is one of the most constructive elements. Mobility and independence is central to many healthy aspirations and opportunities. This makes it even more important that we help, not hinder, their progress and their ability to drive properly.
Let’s look at three handicaps created for young drivers.
1. We constrain children’s experience of risk in their most formative years
There is growing concern that shielding children from risk – especially in their play – stunts their natural development right through to adulthood. They are less aware of how to identify and deal with risks, and less prepared to take self-reliant responsibility for themselves. This has clear implications when they come to drive.
For dread of the slightest graze, we ban everything: ball games, tree swings, snowballs, cycling, running in the playground, and even skipping and conkers. And we thrust our head deep into the sand on the damage that this ’safe from harm overload’ is actually doing.
One of the most striking signs of our times is the extraordinary shrinkage in the ‘radius of freedom’ that most kids now have to venture beyond the garden gate. Many are barely allowed out on their own well into the teen years. But filling them with fear is more about the adult’s own peace of mind than the presence of actual surrounding danger. Play that is fondly prescribed, provided and supervised is negative for their development into capable people.
The ‘cotton wool culture’ of risk aversion and dependence, instead of risk awareness and self-reliance, is an unhealthy lesson for every stage of their life. Alongside frustration at the bewildering rules, it lays down the assumption in their mind that someone else will always look after them.
Interestingly, with this over-protection we have also seen a steady deterioration in behaviour and discipline, notably apparent in schools. Perhaps it would help us understand what we are doing if we see the energies of childhood and adolescence as a balloon that will pop out somewhere else when it is squeezed.
Recent work on ‘frontal lobe development’ is also enlightening. This is the finding that the part of the brain responsible for key functions, such as hazard anticipation and risk management, is not fully developed until age 25. These functions have an obvious application in driving, and also help to counter the over-confidence that comes from the ease with which most youngsters learn physical car control.
It is emerging from trials that the ability of this part of the brain can be improved with training and experience – which is excellent if the training is made available. But it also poses the possibility that the converse can happen too, and that shielding children from risk might inhibit the natural process and pace of brain development, leaving youngsters with even less function than they ’should’ have, and contributing to poor risk management ability.
Clearly, over-protection is a social and cultural trend, but driver training must address this handicap if we are to turn out safe young drivers.
2. We give them fictitious stereotypes of adults, males and drivers
Images of the adult world used in entertainment and marketing often bear little relation to reality. But careful presentation makes unlikely celebrities and fictional characters look like reasonable aspirations and role models. Especially in this fantasy, masculinity is defined as various blends of strong, fearless, daring and arrogant. And cars and driving are often employed to make the point.
For young boys, this taps straight into the raw urge for action-oriented challenges that nature has wired into the male brain. The images are designed to be compelling and to meet with approval in peer groups – who are equally confused about who they are and how to grow up. When they need guiding lights, these are false beacons that point to the rocks.
We see them hooked into the fantasy as the strutting bravado becomes a naked parade of the anxieties and self-doubt that it tries to keep secret. But this is difficult for a teenager to fathom from the inside, and even harder if there is no guiding adult male at home or close by to make sense of it all.
Girls tend to be less affected by the action-stereotype. The yearning in the female brain is to socialise instead. So boys tend to be drawn into ‘heroic quest’ computer games more seriously than girls, while the advent of chat-rooms has suddenly rocketed the hours that girls spend online. Even today’s ’so cool’ techno-kids are still nature’s children, living out predictable roles.
At the same time though, we also see an overlap where some girls seem intent on copying the worst male behaviour, such as binge-drinking, creating a bizarre notion of competition and equality.
But still, and despite what they would have us believe, a lot of young people’s behaviour is guided by what they believe an adult is. And this is definitely something they learn mainly from adults.
In fairness, we should not be surprised that saturating children with an alchemy of distorted stereotypes leads them to strange assumptions about what society wants and expects from them as they grow up. They don’t see through fantasies as well as experienced adults can, and warping their view of the world makes a lot of things more difficult.
Again, this is a handicap created by social factors, but especially for young males, driver training must expose the stereotypes. This begins by recognising the specific flawed beliefs that create macho driving styles, and then carefully dismantling them. The action-impulse doesn’t need to be outlawed, it is the backbone of male achievement, but it does need direction.
3. We withhold the most critical safety skills when we teach them to drive
This is the worst adult delinquency of all – the way we train young people to drive. More than anything else, this ensures high risk when novices suddenly go solo.
There is now a broad and overdue acceptance that “fundamental reform in how we teach people to drive” is urgently needed. The traditional focus on physical car control does not impart the skills required to drive safely. Years of statistics bear testament.
This is no startling revelation, of course, it has been known for generations. The maxim, “You really learn to drive after passing the test”, isn’t an urban myth or something that teenagers dreamt up to torment us. It is a rational adult judgment on the training system borne of long experience – known for decades, yet still allowed to be true.
There are other beliefs implanted into young minds that compound the neglect, such as:
‘Driving skill is about good car control, especially at speed’
‘Good car control will let me handle any situation’
‘The L-test and a bit of practice covers the skills needed for safe driving’
‘Passing the test demonstrates that an acceptable standard of safety has been reached’.
And we should not protest that we don’t directly tell them these things. Again, these are not beliefs the youngsters invent. They are absorbed from the adult ether, and the training system allows them to thrive when it should be doing surgical removal.
In reality, we have been keeping big secrets, because we know that:
real safety is in how drivers think – before they commit to physical actions
focusing on car control will inevitably incite red-blooded young males to prove themselves
novices are left to discover the most critical safety skills for themselves, as best they can on their own. And without being told what the skills are, or that they are necessary
young drivers need to become far safer than their test performance.
The Essential Thinking Skills proposal to the Driving Standards Agency has already outlined a start-point for introducing thinking skills into driver training. It recommends the inclusion of:
Beliefs – that are true (!) and provide a safer mindset from the beginning
Sense of danger – to identify risk in terms that drivers can trust and control
Driving skills framework – to explain how and why thinking skills are so critical
Learning from experience – to implant a naturally increasing safety ability
Specific techniques to improve risk assessment and control in real traffic situations.
To some extent, these are gained over time by experienced drivers. But the mystery box can all be disclosed and taught to learners and novices at the outset.
These are also the skills that enable drivers to take responsibility, and this removes another key blockage. Without knowing how to do it, the call to ‘take responsibility’ is a hollow demand that drivers will always struggle to meet. Car control is a poor illusion of being actually in control of driving situations.
Significantly too, the lack of training in the mental skills leaves novices more exposed to picking up unsafe driving practices from family or friends, or bowing to influence from peer passengers. With little grasp of how to assess risk as they drive, there is no benchmark against which to judge the folly of inattention, drink, drugs, fatigue, wrong speed, or simply acting the fool. They are also more exposed to the dangers created by other road users.
Novice drivers are at the point of being most dependent on what they are shown. And their fate is currently skewed by the yawning chasm in the training they receive.
Conclusion
Through honest eyes, the main reasons for the carnage among novice drivers are rooted in what adults do. We deny youngsters healthy encounters with risk, give them a distorted picture of adulthood, and withhold skills we know they need to have. In our nurturing of future generations, this is simple neglect.
Although some of the handicaps for young drivers are created in society, outside the realm of driving, this does not put them beyond reach. It simply underlines that driving is part of life, and that society tilts the pitch against many things that people need to do.
In driver training, our adult responsibility should lead us to:
recognise how novice drivers are actively steered into high risk
replace false beliefs with ones that will help young people understand and cope more successfully with the demands of driving. This can and should start at pre-driving age
reveal the full scope of driving skill, and show how it really works
teach the specific thinking skills that are the core of drivers being able to take care of themselves.
The necessary reform of driver training must accept the responsibility for creating safe drivers. The system design should not include restrictions and law enforcement as an easier alternative, or to cover over known and avoidable failures in the training. Our job is to work on the causes of the problem, not just punish the symptoms. And no one wants a rising generation that is primed with resentment.
Many novice drivers themselves sense that something is wrong, and would be keen to learn about the ‘real driving’ that confronts them after the test. Young people do want to be skilled, and value the boost that comes from being regarded as such.
The adult responsibility is to take this opportunity, and ensure that fundamental reform is ‘fundamentally different’ from the stream of past measures that have made no impression on the casualty graph.
