All contents copyright ©, Drive and Stay Alive, Inc., 2003 onwards, unless specified otherwise. All rights reserved.

IMPORTANT: click here to read the DISCLAIMER

The comments, below, from Drive and Stay Alive, Inc., were triggered by an interesting article from Forbes:

Virtual Vehicles Teach Teens Highway Safety

Could time spent in a high-tech "driving simulator" help teens become safer drivers?

Researchers at Kansas State University are trying to find out.

"Teen driver safety is a critical issue because automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for our nation's youth. We are focused on assessing psychological fidelity and development of training focused on curbing high risk behaviors," Renee Slick, an assistant professor of psychology and director of KSU's Simulation, Training and Assessment Research (STAR) lab, said in a prepared statement....

Slick said her lab has two main purposes -- to work with teen drivers to assess the effectiveness of simulators and to study whether simulator training transfers to real-life driving situations....

[Read the full article here.]

 DSA Comments 

Perhaps the Ford Motor Company went a long way to summing up a very large part of the problem for young drivers in the U.S.A., in their Driving Skills for Life brochure, where among other things they wrote:

• "Today in the United States, most novice drivers receive little instruction beyond practice driving with a parent riding in the passenger seat;

• The Driving Skills for Life campaign encourages parents and teens to seek out professional behind-the-wheel driver training."

It is our opinion, at DSA, that nobody can contradict the first of these points, and we heartily congratulate Ford for making the remarkably important second point.

With absolutely no disrespect whatsoever intended to the most powerful nation on earth, is it not just possible that something is very, very wrong with the driving standards in America?

Why else, for example, would the U.S.A. perform so poorly -- by comparison to other developed countries -- in the per capita rate of road deaths.¹ The Governments blinkered focus on the VMT rate of deaths is grossly misleading; America is losing people at two-and-a-half times the rate of the leading highly-motorized nations. Yes, of course poor engineering, inadequate road signage, inadequate enforcement and other factors have a role to play, but if human error is behind over 90 percent of all crashes, why isn't something more significant being done to target those errors at their root -- inadequate driver training?

What is it that persuades parents that they know everything there is to know about driver safety and that they are therefore the best people to teach their sons and daughters to drive?  

Let's put that another way: I'm asking any parent reading this to think about your own job. As examples, let's think about mechanics, dentists, secretaries, hairdressers, teachers and executives.

Now think about getting somebody new starting to work with you or for you, to learn your job. How would you feel if their unqualified parent phoned and said: "It's okay, I've taught him/her about (valve timing / cavities / filing / perms / how to handle difficult students / preparing a business plan)?  Would you prefer to teach the new person yourself so that they learned the best possible methods?

Some people may be tempted to argue that driving is different, and it is -- but it is different because unlike any profession in the world, it has killed more people in just over 100 years than have all of the wars in history added together.

Most people believe that they are "good" drivers and -- to a greater or lesser extent -- that most other drivers are not as good! But why is it, then, that each year in America over 42,000 people are killed in road incidents and about 3 million more are injured?

In other words, if -- mercy forbid -- an atrocity on the scale of the World Trade Center massacre was to take place every 23 days in the U.S.A., it would still kill less Americans every year than do road crashes Globally, an atrocity on this scale could occur every 20 hours and still kill less people than do the world's roads!

So why is it that parents who will spend hundreds of dollars -- and in some cases even tens of thousands of dollars -- on their children's education, field trips, sporting activities and hobbies suddenly protest about the cost when it comes to helping to prevent the one thing that stands a sickeningly high chance of killing or maiming those same children?

The answer is regrettably simple and effectively rotates around the "it won't happen to me" syndrome.

The fact is that over 10,000 young people under 25 years of age are killed on America's roads each year, and hundreds of thousands more are injured or disabled. 

One major remedy to this dreadful state of affairs would undeniably come from creating a significantly more rigorous and  nationally uniform driving test. 

If one then adds equally uniform, demanding standards for anyone wishing to become a driving instructor, then it is hard to see how this would not, in due course, help reduce the death toll.

Would existing driving instructors object? Probably not. Anything which tightens driving standards would, after all, inevitably have a beneficial effect on their businesses and good driving instructors are like people in all professions -- they hate to lose trade to incompetent instructors who steal away students by charging ridiculously low rates. The responsibility here is with government, not with market forces. Low quality driving instructors must cease to exist. Too many lives depend on instructors doing a truly good job.

Significantly increasing the standards of driving tests and of driving instructors has everything to recommend it. In this context, America is exactly like all other countries, because the lives of young American people are just as incalculably precious as the lives of all young people around the world.  Other countries have made a significant difference in this quarter, and for once America needs to follow rather than lead.

That only leaves the subject of the article that triggered this commentary -- the subject of driving simulators.

Should young people be taught to drive in simulators?

The answer should undoubtedly be a resounding 'no', just as they shouldn't be taught in a classroom, either.  There is no doubt that some classroom theory is important, and indeed some simulator training on specific problems might be very beneficial. But if maximum safety is the goal it is essential that every young person should spend the vast majority of their learning time with a professional instructor, behind the wheel of a real car, on real and eventually challenging roads.

Copyright © 2005: Eddie Wren (click for bio)

Footnotes

1.  International Road-Crash Fatality Rates, 1998-2002, and  Multi-Country Per Capita Fatality Data for 2003