Rise in teenage driving deaths - what can WE do?

mistyarthur

westie666 wrote:

If they take thier Skill for Life in a 1.6 Civic for example, where they learn skills like overtaking. When they go back to thier 1.0l cars and put these skills into practise, they could find that they dont have the pickup that they had with the Civic. Although they should be taught to drive within thier limits, some will take it too far, and take too many chances

Good point and it just goes to show that whatever you do to try and solve a problem it almost always causes another problem proving whoever deisgned the tests etc. did actually think about it.

BobToo

It all comes back to education. The literal meaning of education is "drawing out", not putting in. By putting in key information, training and supervised practice we hope to draw out the ability, this applies to any skill.

My education as a wheeled road user began on the 17th of October 1978, when I got my first proper bike at the age of 10. My first lesson came on the 20th of October, when I was hit by a car. I learned several things:-

1. There is a limit to how much grip you have on a corner.

2. If you lean a bike over and pedal at the same time the pedal will hit the ground, with predictable results.

3. Car drivers often cut corners

4. Cars are hard

5. So is the road

A few years later I did almost exactly the same thing on the same corner, just like with Algebra you don't always get it first time.

Over the next few years I continued to learn these little lessons and clocked up quite a lot of miles, even tackling the odd rural dual carriageway :eek:

All this meant that I had learned a fair bit of roadcraft by the time I started driving so it was just a matter of adapting what I already knew to driving a car. I think that my introduction to the road was fairly typical at the time, except that a lot of 16/17 year olds used to get motorbikes so they gould get on the road alone before passing their driving test.

Media frenzy about traffic, paedophiles, chavs, drugs etc means that a lot of today's adolescents don't get loose on the roads. Bikes are mostly made for off-road and cyclepath use and the lack of bikes on roads has made the roads even more dangerous for those who do venture onto them. CBT has made motorcycling inaccessible (or at least too difficult to just drift into) for 16/17 year olds so they often take their first driving lesson as a completely blank canvas. They have to learn car control and roadcraft, neither of which lend themselves to learning by rote. I say blank canvas, of course many of these teenagers have clocked up thousands of miles on their games consoles, so their minds are already programmed for fast driving.

In my opinion the roads are just one place we are seeing the effects of a generation being wrapped in cotton wool. We should give our children more freedom.