Safe Speed Forums

I think you are spot on with most of your observations Cotswold. Personally I think the average standard of driving is woeful (and getting worse, year on year). Much as I admire Paul's good intentions I don't think it is possible to turn this around with some kind of re-education program. As I said in an earlier comment some people are just not interested in becoming better drivers (and some couldn't even if they wanted to!).

I don't think we can turn this around by encouragement. Try this for an idea. Re-test every five years with the results compared to previous record of test results. If standard has improved a pass is awarded. If standard has not improved this is noted. If standard has fallen a fail is given. A pass entitles the driver to a 10% reduction in insurance costs. No pass produces no reduction. A fail causes the insurance to rise by 20%
On the next five-yearly test, if a second fail is given, the licence is withdrawn until such time as a pass can be gained on a re-test.

Now for this system to work the test will have to be completely revised. I envisage it as similar to an advanced test where the tester looks for road skills rather that ability to carry out set maneuevers. Like the advanced test the driver would be required to maintain a commentary demonstrating his observational and anticipatory skills. I'm sure this scheme is fraught with pitfalls but I can't really see anything else which would stand a chance of changing the level of driving standards.

I would add that the test would have to drop the ridiculous requirement to "shuffle" the wheel in turns. Also, much credit would be given to drivers who can make good progress in traffic (with safety) Bad news there ladies!

I also very much like your idea of a special licence for towing caravans, trailers and horseboxes (I know, you said MOT but I've extended it) Apart from a really strict test could they be banned from the roads between the hours of 07:30 and midnight?

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I'm not always right, but my score is higher than the government's

Attitudes are developed through ones life experiences and expectations. If we can get at the core of what is wrong with society in general (and I believe that there is quite a lot wrong) then we can perhaps begin to address peoples attitudes towards their driving. Without encouragement, by which I mean a tangible incentive, only very few of our 30 million drivers will be bothered to try to improve. The benefit needs to be clear and meaningful if it is to cut through all of the other things that clutter up peoples lives and grab their attention, the cost of their mortgage, their job, their holiday, their family etc etc will all come first.
Whether the benefit is - additional training, a financial incentive of some sort or even a threat (something that carries real weight, not an empty one) - it won't work unless it has a hook. Appealing to an individual's sense of personal pride is unlikely to strike a chord these days I'm afaraid.

Testosterone is one influence, and adrenaline is another. And I blame TV … look at all those cop shows (French Connection, Bullet etc.) as well as that Top Gear nonsense on a Sunday night. And Bernie Ecclestone with those farcical F1 racing cars!

If we guys can drop this competitive driving bullshit, we'd be well away. My 4 year old want to be a racing car driver, but when we grow up, we should forget those toys.

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It's nowhere near so simple. If we didn't have 'car lovers' we wouldn't invest so much in driving culture. The trick is to optimise the cultural influences, not to create a 'car driving = chore' connection. That wouldn't save lives - we desperately need folk to be INTERESTED.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
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There is a lot of truth in what you say, there is an incredible amount of competition mixed with folk who just want to get from A to B in a safe and uncompetitive manner. How mant times have we heard the term "tailgater" and the standard answer of "I drove faster and faster to avoid the tailgater" etc etc....
See....

Immediately followed by....

The Top Gear attitude amond drivers with the keep up with the Paddy Hopkirk attitude of the eternal small boy is sickening, I just can't bear to watch any more.

Quite right it isn't, but when interest turns to a popular show having a road race consisting of "small boys" in a big car and a train it has no place in driver education or improving road safety. Of course Top gear isn't out to improve road safety, nor to worsen it but it does contribute to the competitive small boy attitude everyday AVERAGE drivers have to contend with many times a day and that isn't helping matters.
How to get your average driver interested in improving? The 5 or 10 year periodic tast would go a long way to improving the situation.

If forceful persuasion doesnt work on your 4 year old, you should consider drugs, or removing both his legs to prevent his adopting a career as a racing driver. There is a real danger that nothing short of such a drastic measure would overcome the influence of TV.
My my - all those cop dramas, and westerns we watched must have lead to dozens of would be detectives and cattle ranchers following their chosen career!! Or is following what you see on TV unique to motoring programs? I hope so - my wife likes watching Dr Gee performing autopsies, and solving forensic puzzles!!!

I never saw an episode of Top Gear where tailgating was fêted, and none of the F1 teams can go fast enough to leave a tailgater behind! Maybe they should broadcast a disclaimer like the one we used to see after Batman!! "Dont try this at home folks!"

If they wont do it themselves, then the additional test would be a pointless burden on the system.
It would be better if there were an incentive such as cheaper insurance, or reduced road tax to people who CHOSE to take additional training - after all accidents are costly, so it would be self financing by reducing the drain on the NHS!

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

Wot! But I have great fun with me digital Scalextric and me train set and me road set - and me Airfix models!

The rogues aged 7 and 5 are competitive and baby kitten tiries to out crawl them already! This kitten has potential! Very competitive feisty children and healthy attituides to life!`

Competitiveness is healthy. Take this away and we lose that quest to progress./ Wildy is competitive. If she lost this - then two well used drugs would never have been discovered and licenced. My brainy wife has a third team effort awaiting licence. Quite a feat for her team.



Paul gave excellent advice as to how to deal with persistant tailgater as have the posting collective.



You watch with an open mind and your own common sense as a road user takes precedence. - or should do.




Its TV! Escapism|! I find it fun to watch and average advanced / experienced/ novice common sense driver will always drive to a COAST principle. As evidenced by accident rate whihc if broken down properly would reveal that unlicenced and illegal prats cause the bulk of the accidents, followed closely by thos who drive whilst unfit.

Oh - my source - Hospital stats at actual source before "doctoring!" and returning

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Personally I would strongly oppose any proposals for more rigorous testing that in practice would have the effect of substantially reducing the number of licensed drivers.

Of course safety is important, but so is the liberation, flexibility and convenience provided by mass car use, which in my view, as someone interested in transport politics, is a vital feature of our present-day society. There must be a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If we take 5 or 10 million drivers off the roads, we achieve Transport 2000's "modal shift" overnight. And insisting on tests to advanced standard would do precisely that.

It doesn't necessarily follow that fewer drivers means safer roads. It would lead to fewer vehicles, travelling faster because of the lack of traffic jams, and result in more mileage by pedestrians and cyclists, which are more risky modes. Every bus passenger is also a pedestrian for part of their journey. I'm not saying it's a causal factor, but over time casualty reductions have gone hand in hand with an increase in the proportion of licensed drivers in the population.

Also bear in mind that the time and money spent on training can have as much influence on passing a test as inherent ability - you might end up with a population of well-off drivers rather than of genuinely good ones.

And, if driving was seen as an "elite" activity rather than a "democratic" one, it could well be that society was less, rather than more, tolerant of drivers and expected higher standards of legal compliance than at present.

My view is that we need to look at practical ways of improving the overall quality of the existing driver population rather than pursuing a policy of "fewer equals better".

Be careful what you wish for!

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

If you can think of a "practical" way of improving driving standards let's hear it.

You label the policy I advocated as "fewer equals better" well, if we remove the bad elements won't that be better?

If you consider that these proposals would "substantially reduce the number of licensed drivers" what does that say for your view of the current driving standards?

Personally, I don't think the advanced driving test is all that difficult. In my opinion any decent driver who learns from experience and takes an interest in the craft (yes, I would call it a craft) would make a decent stab at it. I have often considered going in for it myself, the only thing that stops me is the absurd requirement to "shuffle" the wheel!

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I'm not always right, but my score is higher than the government's

Top Gear - light hearted if irreverant entertainment with some useful information chucked in from time to time about cars. I suspect Steve & co have still got their knickers in a twist over them plugging the camera atlas. Sure, they do get some expensive and very quick cars to thrash on the track, but... it's on a track. If you think that in any way promotes chavs doing the same thing on housing estates - as if they wouldn't be doing it anyway. Top Gear was off the screens for several years, yet while it was away I very much doubt that aggressive drivers were any calmer and I doubt just as much that they've been any worse in the time it's been back. F1? Getting dull the last few years, but again, I don't think motorsport in general and especially F1 in particluar has got anything to do with the way the vast majority of drivers behave. Besides, more and more people are getting turned off F1 for one reason and another. Can we really believe that we're getting more agressive driving because of a sport which is declining in popularity? In a word, balls.

IMO what's creating agressive driving on the roads is quite simply the pressures of modern living combined with falling standards of driving. I'm sure the last guy tailgating me wasn't doing it becaues he'd seen Top Gear or the Grand Prix at the weekend. Almost certainly he was doing it because he needed to be somewhere quickly and I wasn't in any particular hurry. Not terribly surprising really. Getting from A to B quickly is what cars are for, and we have 'em because we need 'em. We don't all work within walking distance, or at least a short horse ride, of the village anymore. And, as is being discussed on another thread, public transport is hopelessly inadequate most of the time, and quite often simply non-existent. None of that excuses tailgating or other types of aggressive driving (as opposed to competitive driving which to me implies something regulated with skilled drivers and some sort of prize at the end of it). However, to point the finger at the bloody TV isn't going to solve anything. It's the usual choice of people who've run out of other things to blame or who simply lack the will to tackle the real problems. (And I mean that in a much more general sense than we're talking here.)

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

At one extreme, you have the good driver who thinks he is poor, which is OK, I think, if he acts accordingly to reduce risk. At the other extreme, you have the poor driver who thinks he is really quite good. I think there are many of these - perhaps even some of us!

Then you have the driver who thinks he is poor, and actually is. You have to commend his honesty. And last, you have the driver who thinks he is good, and really is - these are as rare as hen’s teeth.

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Commend their honesty, yes, but is there anything commendable about their attitude? Shouldn't they want to improve their skills? Shouldn't the rest of us expect it of them?

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

We can’t tell the drivers who are poor and know they are poor from the drivers who are poor and think they are good. So one answer is that the rest of us can’t expect anything of them, if we (and perhaps even they) don’t know who they are! But I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, in the balance, if I was God and could choose, I suppose I’d rather that the poor driver knows he is poor, than go on in the ignorant belief that he is really quite good. At least if he knows he is crap, he can make some sort of compensation, like going more slowly or something, or getting trained. In that respect, yes, it would be good if drivers who are poor and know they are poor took some extra training – but how do we get them to admit to themselves how crap they are? One way is to give them a constructive warning (a NIP???)

So, at one level, a NIP is a warning to a driver to tell them how poor they are. But how do we measure ‘poorness’? One way would be to use a measure like computer manufactures. They try to predict ‘Mean Time Between Failure’. For drivers, we could use ‘Mean Distance Between Failure’, and we should try to predict, based on what we see, what a driver’s ‘Mean Distance Between Failure’ is. Any driver with a low MDBF is a poor driver who may or may not know it. They should get a copy of their MDBF report, so that at least they can see how crap they really are. In a sense, the NIP system already works a little like that, although I’d expect a robust argument about how we can predict MDBF based on speed camera evidence!

And of course, I’d argue back that any driver can raise their MDBF by going more slowly. But that’s just me being me!

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But what constitutes a 'Failure' in the MDBF equation?
A poor driver can have many, many near misses (or should that be 'near hits') without an accident being recorded, assuming that an accident is what classifies a 'failure' in this case. A victimless conviction can't be regarded as a 'failure', as there is no failure to do anything like keep the vehicle from hitting another vehicle, no failure to stay on the road, no failure to prevnt injury to self or anyone else.
On the other hand, a reasonably skilled driver could make one mistake for spurius reasons. I'm not claiming to be a good driver, just very experienced, but my last, and only, accident, was in 1973 when trying to drive home when the flu was beginning - you all know the feeling. I made a mistake and caused an accident. The failure was not really my lack of overall driving ability, just my temporarily impared ability. I made a mistake, although how else I would have got home is anyone's guess in the circumstances. I was a particularly poor driver that day, although I may be a poor driver every day, but that's not for me to judge.
Poor drivers do know that they are poor. Their insurance premiums reflect this. They might not admit it, but they pay for it. To be ridiculously simplistic, why not order re-training for drivers who lose their no-claim discounts (I'm not being really serious here, just making a point).

Fair enough, it might not be easy. But I don't think it's as hard as you make out. A bad driver who cheerfully admits they're no good (which was the type PeterE mentioned in the first place) is easy to identify. They're telling us - how much easier can it get? What's harder is when they tell you how good they are. Are they really good or just think they are? I'm kind of with you on that one, but they're not the type we're talking about.


Since we're talkng specifically about poor drivers who know that they are poor drivers I don't agree that we should expect nothing of them. Having recognised their own faults, which I agree is commendable, the obvious next step is to get off their arses and fix the problem.


Going more slowly is the current choice, but it's a completely inadequate substitute. I'd rather they get training or get off the road. Or at the very least start trying to learn from their mistakes.


Totally inadequate. As we keep saying, you don't have to be driving fast enough to trigger a camera to be a crap driver. I know quite a few that actually terrify me when I'm a passenger. Not because they're fast. They're not. But because they don't observe properly and can't anticipate, and as a result they frequently drive too f:censored:ing fast for the circumstances and have loads of near misses. In other words, they're TIBMINs. But again, we're discussing drivers who know they're no good and do nothing about it, which I would distinguish from TIBMINs who really don't have a clue how badly they're driving. And the point is that bad drivers are often bad at driving for reasons quite unrelated to speed, so if you choose to believe that the NIP is a warning system it's wasted since they simply won't get any.


Well, not much. Since the vast majority of crashes have causes other than speed all that this will achieve is slightly less damage when the inevitable failure occurs. It may mitigate but it will do little or nothing to prevent. I'd go further and say that in some ways it could make them even worse by giving them a false sense of safety.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

A failure is crash. We are talking about MEAN Distance Between Failure. Such an assessment is statistical, and does not determine the outcome for an individual driver and all his near misses. It is an attempt to assess how far a driver can expect to get (on the average) between crashes in his or her current circumstances. For many of us, it would be a lifetime of driving or more, so a good MDBF to have would be in the order of hundreds of thousands of miles. A poor, inexperienced youth might have a MDBF of a mere 20,000 miles. The outcome for any individual will wildly vary from his MDBF, and his MDBF will change as his circumstances change- even the worst dumbos can avoid crashing by luck. The ‘authorities’ would stress that speed is a determining factor in MDBF.



That would improve your chances of keeping your next no-claim discount once you have built it up, so it’s not ridiculous.

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This is very sexist - I know plenty of young women (and some not so young either) who like driving fast, and who I think are sometimes over-aggressive. Mrs Rewolf and Sister Rewolf both fall into the fast category, and I am sometimes concerned about Mrs Rewolfs lack of respect for the two second rule. She also takes my car whenever she can get an excuse to because she likes the speed...

I also know a few women that just lack confidence when driving, especially when on motorways, and will do everything to avoid MWay drving - but this is purely down to exposure and experience. I would suggest that the split between men and women in terms of general speed is more due to opportunity and experience. Women in general tend to stay in the local area, Men tend to have to drive further and get the responsibility on the longer journeys.

Any driver who raises his MDBF is increasing road safety for us all. If going more slowly lengthens your MDBF, then that is OK to do. Unless you rate rushing about more highly than safety?

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Perhaps nature is sexist? Do these fast, aggressive young women get pinged as often as blokes do? Is thier MDBF higher or lower than blokes? Insurance companies seem to consider them a better risk.

In any case, thier MDBF could be higher than blokes, yet they can still cause less road risk because they drive less. Gosh, this is complicated!

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That's a huge mistake. A failure is a surprise. If that's too personal, then a failure is an emergency brake or steering application.

These 'incidents' are far more commonplace than crashes and gives a far higher resolution result for an individual.

But above that, we need to learn from our surprises - which is another good reason to tell folk that they are important events.

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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