Safe Speed Forums

I've been mulling over what the core problem of road safety is.

On SS we are clear that current safety policy is focussing on the wrong things.

We are clear that more trafpol would be more effective at regulating driving behaviour in a positive way.

We are clear that good drivers regulate their progress by making decisions and choices around conditions, perceived risk etc And of course, of the need to promote the whole COAST ethos (which IAM etc endorse)

We are also clear that current policy doesn't address the dangers represented by the drunk/criminal/reckless driver - trafpol is the answer here.

BUT, the majority of the problems caused are the result of COAST failures, bad judgement, carelessness (as opposed to recklessness) - ie basically, bad driving.

Much of what the SS community espouses will "mitigate" the impact of this, but it will NOT "address" it - most people, the way things are, will not espouse COAST (except by lip service) and my perception is that driving standards are indeed falling - there are all sorts of reasons one can identify for this, including cultural ones, and many have been discussed at length on here. The question is how can one actually create a road safety culture where the STANDARD/QUALITY of driving is seen as paramount by those using our roads, what does society/government need to put in place as policy to achieve this?

I don't claim to know the answers - I'm just thinking out loud!

I think we first need to measure the culture. We ask a standardised sample of drivers psychological / beliefs profiling questions and compare average (and exceptional) results to an ideal. The ideal would be derived from a sample of low risk drivers and tweaked by knowldge and research.

Having defined the problem we then set about developing strategies designed to deal with sub optimal cultural beliefs in the 'normal' part of the population.

And we can develop better policing strategies for dealing with the below normal parts of the population since we now know more about them.

But I'll stick my neck out and guess at the sorts of things we'd need to deal with.

* Devise strategies that demonstrate to drivers that they still have plenty to learn. An advanced test with a score would be useful for pub chat.

* Knock out key false beliefs with well targetted advertising. I'm betting on
- learn from your mistakes to replace 'there wasn't anything I could do'.
- strengthen personal responsibility
- put safety first (way above right of way - a key problem)

* Create a list of learning triggers (a named list of key mistakes to aid recognition)

* Communicate highly accurate risk factors.

* Create a near miss helpline to assist folk wishing to learn from their mistakes.

* Ease off the regulatory pressue and build up qualitative measures of success (As well as quantitative ones: no crashes, no surprises)

That should get the ball rolling.

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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 agree with what you say above Paul. I feel that the coherent promotion of such an agenda alongside (shall we say) SS's "criticism" of current policy could be a way of winning more support, and possibly funding, from a wider slice of society and opinion influencers.

I do. But it's not the sort of thing that interests newspapers. I must say I need to do more to get it written up. But it is in the manifesto:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/manifesto.html (Still needs work).

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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

The manifesto is what's needed to retain those drawn to look at SS as a result of the more media-focussed stuff (not for the media itself), and as a propaganda tool pitched at those in positions to help SS's aims and/or influence policy at any level.

I agree it needs work, but is very much going in the right direction...

I think the present driving test and training is far too simple, and seems geared to getting a driver on the road as quickly as possible with the minimum of training effort on behalf of the authorities.

When in the past I have suggested this, I have been asked "who is going to pay for having a dearer training/testing regime?
If you saw the cars some youths drive nowadays, and the insurance they pay, I would think it obvious!

We would also benefit from having the basic points of road safety repeated regularly on our television sets, where it will eventually sink in!
Finally, the highway authorities need to think more about the design of roads and junctions.
Recently in our area, junctions were altered with hatched islands which made the situation worse.
Even if they were to improve a junction - why did they not get it right the first time!

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

The joy of driving is not promoted and is seen as un pc. This is a fundamental change from years ago. Too many people just see a car as a way to get from A to B as quickly as possible without taking any pride or satisfaction in the process. If you can tackle some of that and make more people enthusiasts rather than mere users I think you might start to undo some of the negative changes. The more people see cars as white goods the more they are obsessed with mere function and making the entire driving process as antiseptic as possible.

My first stab would be driver training and the test system.

Many collegues and personal contacts I know do not know of the system of car control, do not know of COAST, have many bad habits and take the think and speed kills adverts as gospal.

Compare the training that a new driver gets and the testing that they have to undertake to get a licence, if you compare that to the Police Class 1 or to flying or other licencable processes where getting it wrong could kill you or others, it appears to be woefully inadequate. I mean FFS the day after passing your test you can drive on the motorway without ever having been on one or having had 'fast road' training.

Take the pre and post Hendon standard of police driving. By actually teaching someone to drive rather than pass a test we might get somewhere in reducing accidents, how often have you heard 'It was a silly accident really'?

Lets get a test system that actually trains and actually tests drivers.

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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

That presents an interesting conundrum...

If the test is made more difficult there is going to be a fraction of drivers (possibly quite a large one) that will never pass, that's almost an inevitability - just look at the "average" standard of driving now. So what happens to these "disenfranchised" individuals in this day of poor public transport and/or the long commute? Are they to be deprived of the possibility of holding down a decent job, visiting granny, getting to the supermarket? And you can't say that "they're the thick ones and won't get a good job anyway" - I know one or two highly-intelligent and very well professionally qualified individuals who are terrible drivers. One side-effect could be an increase in unlicensed driving as the perennial failures give up trying and go over to "the dark side".

Maybe better perhaps to keep the basic test requirements much the same as they are today, indicating a very rudimentary degree of skill, though with more emphasis given to COAST principles so that there's some chance that the b*ggers will at least look where they're going most of the time, and introduce a "carrot" incentive scheme for those who pass advanced tests - though what the carrot would be, I haven't much idea...

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

If you are going to go down to the COAST, then you need a far better acronym. Coasting is drifting along without a care in the world!! Also - the words in COAST are too long, no-one will remember them.

Also - if you have a name as a Speed Camera organisation, or as a strident shouting organisation (Paul - your quote in the Times today could be seen in that way) then it is hard to be taken seriously on Road Safety matters.

If you really want to change Road Safety I'd suggest a fundamental rethink, and a re-branding - the organisation may well have too much historical baggage and not enough constructive criticism from within. You need more 'ordinary' people. Not people who will bring 'heel and toeing' into a thread.

I've said this a few times before - but you really need to think very carefully about the stats you use and what they really mean. WVM is NOT safer for pedestrians than Cyclists. But that is what went out in your PR and that is what the media picked up on. But it is not true!

I'm new here, and I'm sure there will be lots of posts disagreeing with me. The more post disagreeing with me there are, then the more my latter points stand!!!

Pogo: "That presents an interesting conundrum...

If the test is made more difficult there is going to be a fraction of drivers (possibly quite a large one) that will never pass, that's almost an inevitability"

I don't think that the test should necessarily be more difficult, but as I pointed out you can drive on the motorway with no tuition, so perhaps we should look at where a person can drive and teach and test them on that, i.e. we have multi stage test where you pass and drive unaccompanied on most roads but motorways/fast roads you have to have mandatory training and a m-way test.

" - just look at the "average" standard of driving now. So what happens to these "disenfranchised" individuals in this day of poor public transport and/or the long commute? Are they to be deprived of the possibility of holding down a decent job, visiting granny, getting to the supermarket? And you can't say that "they're the thick ones and won't get a good job anyway" - I know one or two highly-intelligent and very well professionally qualified individuals who are terrible drivers. One side-effect could be an increase in unlicensed driving as the perennial failures give up trying and go over to "the dark side". "

Yes can see what you are saying, public transport is piss poor I agree but again in certain parts of my profession we will not pass someone if they cannot perform safely irrespective of the fact if that may cost them the job, not an easy one to answer but will think on about it.

Another point is that I don't feel that driving is necessarily a right but a responsibility, the lady in 'Driving school' passed after 70 tests, she had spent most of her life taking tests, since passing she has written off cars at a fairly regular rate, IMO she should have been taken to one side after 15 tests and told 'You are not a driver, give up before you hurt someone'.

Having seen her on tv and heard her on the radio she comes across as sharp and witty, so I don't think it's a lack of intelligence that makes her a lousy driver.

"Maybe better perhaps to keep the basic test requirements much the same as they are today, indicating a very rudimentary degree of skill, though with more emphasis given to COAST principles so that there's some chance that the b*ggers will at least look where they're going most of the time, and introduce a "carrot" incentive scheme for those who pass advanced tests - though what the carrot would be, I haven't much idea..."

As for the carrot how about drastic reductions in insurance premiums rather than the crap 30 quid off that many offer.

As a comparison NZ used the british test system and had a fairly poor accident record, they then changed to a multi part system see this link: http://www.ltsa.govt.nz/factsheets/45.html

The accident rate has improved drastically, with few potential drivers being disenfranchised from driving, instead because the system is clear and coherant and it has brought standards up.

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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

We already have this system to some extent – those who passed their test in an automatic aren’t licensed to drive a manual. However, “the dark side” problem rears its ugly head again: what’s to stop drivers going beyond the limits of their license? Do we really want full ANPR coverage to police such policies?

I’ve just noticed how similar the words police and policies are – coincidence?


The question remains, what to do with the ‘Maureens’ of the world?
* Imposing limitations accounting for this lowest common denominator would automatically place unfair restrictions upon the capable majority, it's also socially uneconomical (it seems like this is happening anyway).
* Letting them loose without special restriction is obviously dangerous and will frequently have unfair and uneconomical results for some other unlucky road users (accidents).
* letting them loose with special restriction (levels of license)
* Raising the bar such that they are prevented from getting behind the wheel would be uneconomical for them, but would it be unfair?

Unfortunately, in Blair’s PC Britain where people are no longer sorted by ability (such that no-one can feel like a loser), the last option is inconceivable (as is the third to a lesser extent). While we have these types of decision maker, the ability of the majority won’t be recognised or rewarded, there’s no incentive to better ourselves. I think this might well be contributing to the unexpectedly low standards we’re seeing today.

We were talking the other night at our local IAM group about how to get more people interested in advanced driver training. I'm new to all of this but it came across pretty clearly that very few drivers are interested in this sort of thing.

Which must mean that the vast majority of drivers are happy with their driving skills. The only time where any of them might consider that their skills fall a bit short is when a policeman stops them and tells them this - a pretty remote possibility these days.

I think the fundamental problems are:

- road safety is seen as highly uninteresting
- people think they 'know all they need to know' or at the very least 'know enough'
- when people do get a scare on the roads they don't appreciate how they contributed to it themselves
- there's no useful measure of driver quality that ordinary people can use as a yardstick to position themselves
- the IAM have a fuddy-duddy image (more highly uninteresting)
- people don't even know what the skills that they lack are (you don't know what you don't know)

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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

Or, perhaps worse, seen as interesting only when it is absent - failures in road safety produce knee-jerk responses - we need to get road safety as something society/communities see as something they want to feel proud of



Sadly true - we need to promote a "you never stop learning/there is always something to learn" culture - on a national (rather than a road safety) level, it is something I have a large vested interest in!



Worse - we have developed an overall "it's not my fault" culture - so people tend not to even consider that they may have contributed...



Agreed - got an answer? - maybe by rewarding success in advanced training?

See last answer - if rewards existed, the IAM might become more "attractive"?



Yes, but most people know what they have problems with (and the more honest know what they are bad at). An example, a few years ago my wife kept cracking the plastic bumpers on the Maestros she was driving at the time. As this proved costly, I asked her why it kept happening. She admitted she was "terrible at reversing". Investigation then showed that she had NEVER been taught to use wing mirrors when reversing. A hours effort with me on the problem and it never recurred. So not knowing what you don't know isn't a problem provided you are honest enough to identify its symptoms! (Most aren't sadly)

The IAM really need to persuade young drivers to get involved a.s.a.p. after they have passed their tests and before they start to develop bad habits. The best way would be to arrange serious discounts with the major insurers. If you a young driver could halve their first years premium it would be well worth the time and effort. My brother's experience after he past the advanced test was that the IAM recomended insurers were still much more expensive than the standard premiums from Direct Line etc.

That would indeed, be a good "carrot". Just wondering, I doubt that there are enough young IAM members to produce a statistically significant sample, but are there any figures concerning accident rates of IAM members v the general public?

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

The IAM has published claims in the past that their members was 'less than half' as crash prone as other drivers. I don't have a reference for that.

But there are huge problems with this sort of data:

- The IAM standards are patchy - they vary from group to group.
- IAM members are self-selected so benefit of 'type' cannot be separated from benefits of training.
- IAM membership is not usually noted on insurance forms, so insurance company data is limited

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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

That makes it a bit of a lottery, innit?


You could say that it doesn't matter, as long as having "passed the test" equates to "being a safer driver".


Now that does make doing the figures a tad trickier..!

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

It matters to an insurance company offering a discount because they might move a risky group into the IAM category because of the discount.

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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