Safe Speed Forums

I'd say that there has to be a desire to learn, but also at some point one has to realise that one's own skills AREN'T perfect. How many people drive around thinking that their skills are OK, without actually knowing any better?

For instance, I was fairly comfortable with my driving until I met Nos. As a LGV driver, his levels of skill in all of the above fields HAVE to be top notch - its required to pass the tests for one. Until I drove with him in the car after asking him to comment on my ability I didn't realise there was more to it than what I'd been taught at 17. After that, he began effectively testing me to LGV standards on observation and the like, so very quickly I learned advanced skills. Now I KNOW to improve myself, I do, and I kick myself when I miss things.

So, does the current system actually give the impression that passing 'the test' IS actually sufficient? I don't remember any form of encouragement to train further...

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

I've got on fairly well in my career to date despite my relatively young age beacause I've been

1: exposed to lots of different experiences and scenarios.
2: Learned my lessons.

How do we accelerate that process?

We have to separate experience from 'time serving' How well do we de-brief during lessons or 'learning experiences'? How do we recognise and learn from the critical incidents? How do we learn from other people's experiences?

Lets face it a vast proportion of our learning is from mistakes either our own or others.

The process of tucking this stuff away in the subconcious is known as cognitive recoding. I don't want to go too much into learning theory, but recoding involves the "rolling up" of many steps into a single step. For an example take the classic making of a cup of tea. After you've done it a few times, you recode the process:

1. unplug kettle
2. remove lid
3. take to tap
4. place kettle under spout
5. open tap
6. wait for sufficient water to enter kettle
7. close tap
8. take kettle to counter top
9. replace lid
10. plug in kettle

to the single step:

1. fill kettle

In both cases, the process is initiated by a trigger "insufficient water in kettle".

In a similar manner, the many steps necessary to avoid a particular hazard become one step triggered by the recognition of that hazard.


We agree. New drivers must undergo the recoding process, which is part of how we learn. However, there is a point at which sufficient recoding has occurred that our conditioned responses let us cope with most of what we encounter on the roads. It is at that point where the automatic learning process ceases and thus that is the point at which we need to take steps to extend the learning process; to ensure continued learning and thus further improvement.

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Will

I agree with Sixy in that there has to be a desire to learn, IMO there also has to be a desire to improve. That’s the only point I was trying to make earlier. Some people have the desire to learn enough to get them through the driving test, once that’s been achieved they then lack the desire to expand on what they’ve learnt and improve there driving skills. Even at 53 years of age I still have a desire to experiment and improve my driving, this happens because this is something within my own conscience. I don’t believe you will be able to extend the learning process of someone who doesn’t have that desire.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

These sorts of subconscoious processes are learned, well, subconsciously.

I don't think it's possible for someone to drive for (say) a decade after passing their test without getting much better at things like hazard recognition.

But - crucially - I do think people can learn at very different rates - and I think we can help or hinder the learning by experience process.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I think that might be true to a point, but if the basic observation is poor, then will the driver ever actually NOTICE the near misses and close calls? You can't leran without making mistakes, BUT you have to KNOW that you've made a mistake. I think that's the critical thing. IMO the driving test doesn't lay proper foundations from which the AVERAGE driver CAN improve.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

If we introduced compulsory check rides or advanced training you would. If an observer tells you where you've fallen into bad habits or gives you tips to better your driving, you are at least aware that potential for improvement exists. Although some will discount the advice given, at least they will have considered it where they would not otherwise.

Then start telling people that nobody's perfect and that in nearly all accidents the "innocent parties" could have done something to lessen the accident, if not avoid it altogether. After all, it's no good arguing you had right of way while waiting at the Pearly Gates. Replace the "speed kills" mantra with something that gets people to think about and learn from each incident to improve their safety. With the right media messages etc. I'm convinced we can make a big improvement.

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Will

I think we also have to change the standard of instruction and testing, afetr passing my test I was told I was a driver, and many friends have had the same comment upon passing thier test. The implication being they have nothing further to learn, or could be taken that way.

Likewise, what incentive is there to take advanced driver training, be it RoSPA, IAM or other? I could get a better discount by shopping around than from any of the insurers that offer an IAM discount and the 'official' IAM approved insurers are stupid money to begin with.

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Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

while i agree with what you have said, i refer to them simply as learning to drive = pre test and gaining experience is post test. it makes it easier in conversation and making references to the stage of the driver/s in question

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Richie

SSAFA supporter
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=126025031585

Exactly!

For some of the worse drivers, it's positively "un-cool" to take advice. Those people who tailgate. who think it's a weakness to indicate their intentions, who think it's too much effort to turn on lights in reduced visibility.

They are proud of the way they drive and feel that advanced driving would "cramp their style".

Further to this, once you have carried out the task a few times EXPERIENCE will tell you that less water in the kettle means it will boil quicker.

However, you could LEARN that by having somebody TEACH you, without ever having had your hands on a kettle.
So there ARE subtle differences between LEARNING and EXPERIENCE.

Perhaps experience is important in reinforcing the learning. Driving needs to be taught - mere expereience would never succeed on it's own.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

That's what everyone does - and it leads us (society) to undervalue experience. And especially so if we looking to 'improve experience learning'.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

You cannot undergo the learning process I described without doing it "hands on". I don't want to go too much into learning theory, but recoding is essential to making sense of the world around us. If someone teaches you and you haven't had your hands on a kettle, you will have to go conciously through each of the ten "sub-steps" when you first come to do it for real. Recoding those ten steps to a single step lets you fill the kettle without conciously thinking of each of the actions.

Note that even the ten steps of the first procedure I gave are actually recoded from steps of finer granularity. For example, how would you unplug the kettle? Perhaps you'd use something like:

1. Check whether switch at wall socket is in the up position.
2. If required, move switch at wall socket to the up position.
3. Grasp the plug at the base of the kettle.
4. Gently pull the plug until it is free of the kettle.

Just about everything we do has been recoded from smaller steps and as we learn (from practical experience) much of that learning process is the rolling up of smaller steps into larger steps so that the smaller steps become "automatic" or "instinctive".

In the 1950s, a famous psychologist called George A. Miller wrote a paper called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" and subtitled "Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" that laid a lot of the groundwork for our understanding of this process. If you're of a technical disposition this paper makes interesting reading.

It turns out that our capacity for processing information is seriously limited. You might think that you're processing shedloads but what your concious mind is actually doing is fetching a small number of bits of information (a maximum of between five and nine for most people) into "immediate working memory", manipulating those, and placing the results back into "short-term storage memory". When you've recoded a process to a single step, what before the recoding process was handled by manipulation in "immediate working memory" is now handled subconciously and takes up only one bit of your concious processing capacity. In a nutshell, this is why practice until rudimentary tasks become subconcious is so important: moving them to the subconcious frees up some of the very limited concious processing capacity we have so that we can concentrate (for example) on hazard awareness rather than the mechanics of driving.

HTH,

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Will

I had forgotten about the 7 pieces of information... it is something I was taught as part of Process and User Interface design, but basically came down to KISS (Keep It Simple; Stupid), which served much better for designing good UIs.

However, at the risk of going off at a tangent (hey this is brainstorming) - what happens to a driver when a speed camera is on the road? Remember that 7 is the maximum number of pieces of information that the typical human brain can work with, and anything else is (temporarily) discarded.

1) Is that a Speed Camera?
2) What is the danger zone (what area does it cover)?
3) What is the limit it enforces?
4) What speed am I doing?
5) What correction to speed do I need to make?
6) What is the vehicle in front doing, and do I need to react?
7) Am I still steering down my lane?

Then add in any other little issues, such as being on a steep down slope which complicates 4 & 5, or parked vehicles which cause the lane to vary, thus complicating 7, and the speed camera takes ALL available concentration. Minor little details such as a pedestrian stepping out from behind one of those parked vehicles now are outside of the typical drivers capacity for processing information, and they cannot react in time. Crunch!

Ok this needs some refinement, but could be the basis for a more scientific argument (if psychology is counted as a science!) as to why Speed Cameras make drivers more dangerous. Even when the camera isn't immediately obvious drivers that have been stung with a mobile will be using 2 or 3 of their 7 processing slots just watching out for potential camera locations and speedo watching. What does everybody think?

Rewolf I wont pretend to know anything about psychology, but as a motorist who has been stung by said mobile camera,

I can say with regret that whenever I approach a flyover I am conscious that I am studying the flyover for vans hiding at the side (like the one that got me) when I know that I want to be studying the slip roads for other traffic which may become directly relevant to me.

I know I need to be looking at slip roads ahead and checking for traffic coming up behind which may dive across in front of me, but I am, sadly, drawn to studying the (completely irrelevant in terms of safety) flyover bridge for talivans.

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You have the kernel of an argument there. However IMO even more damaging is the focus on the secondary safety factor of speed to the exclusion of the primary safety factors. Basically, this is causing people to recode by rolling up along the wrong dimension, which puts the emphasis at even a subconcious level on speed rather than the space and time that can actually keep you safe.

For example, consider that idiot of a BBC reporter in this thread. While her subconcious (instinctive) reaction to the car making the U-turn should have been to recognise the lack of space and how vulnerable she would be if the other driver actually carried out the threat indicated by his reversing lights, she probably just assumed the other driver would wait for her to pass and then checked her speedo to ensure she was within the speed limit - after all, as far as the propaganda fed to the public is concerned, safety = obedience of the speed limit. In doing that she would have robbed herself of valuable space and time in which to react had the other driver moved backwards. Since the lack of space behind the other vehicle posed a threat, I feel she'd have been better off holding short and inviting the other driver to complete his manoeuvre. That would have completely removed the danger from her perspective and helped the other driver get out of harms way as quickly as possible.

This is a very difficult concept to communicate, but HTH,

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Will

Wow! I love reading these posts- you guys are so interesting.

However, I would like to add something that has been alluded to here.

The great problem with the learning experience is that, without proper tuition, we accept actions as being correct and safe, when they can be far from that.

The classic example is driving too close to the vehicle in front. Because we are so seldom punished for our mistakes, these actions become acceptable and exhibit themselves as being without risk.

This is generally refered to as a "bad habit", but without guidance, our experience will not recognise it as such.

Right. I reckon 'guiding experience' is the holy grail. Sometimes the guidance is cultural. Sometimes it's informational. Sometimes it's training.

And we get several good bites at 'bad habits' with this sort of philosophy. In the tailgating case, we'll say:

- don't tailgate
- learn from your mistakes (sudden braking and surprises are mistakes)
- manage space
- look far ahead
- position for vision

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul - thinking back to my disastrous days as an ex learner - i passed with 10 hours tuitition --- first thing that happened - my uncle took over - i got TAUGHT to drive , be made road aware - looking back - i see a similarity between his teachings and COAST - he and my father mentored .

Those days ,father , or a friend taught son/daughter to drive and once past the test took an interest.


Then we had the professional advisers - trafpols with a graduated scale of advice .I've even asked for advice from a parked one -and got it.


Today - driving schools - churning out drivers whose skills (in the main ) are to be able to pass the test - some pride themselves on getting better - most never will. Who mentors them ??

And who looks out for poor driving skills on our roads.

So we have two areas to address -
1) the education and advancement of passed learners.Some incentive to see driving as a skill and advance it , not as a chore .
2) Education on the road - perhaps it is time that the powers that be see road safety as something to be done "on the spot" rather than at a later date. A "pull" for something stupid - could lead to a newby being put on the path to better driving - who knows - with the lack of skilled professionals we will never know.

About 4 years ago I asked a Police driver where I could learn more about driving (My grandfather was IAM and also mentioned a Police course he (as a member of the public) was able to do).

He just advised I went and found an empty car park somewhere

My nearest IAM group is 45 miles away from where I live. I couldn't afford the milage (or borrow parent's car for long enough) to go to IAM, and I've never got round to doing it since.

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