Safe Speed Forums

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6736587.stm


So slavish adherence to rules is an important characteristic of a good driver, is it?

And presumably the "right" answers to such a questionnaire could easily be learned anyway.

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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

In the same way a small number of people are able to control themselves to beat lie detector tests, some people would be able to get past a psychometric tests.

However, people seem to forget that driving a vehicle is a privilege, not an automatic right. If it stops a few nutters with an overly aggressive nature being on the roads, then that would be a good thing.

I think the point has been made on here before that driving is not a privilege - which implies something handed out to a chosen few - but an entitlement, which anyone has the right to do so long as they can satisfy the objective requirements.

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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

Peter, you beat me by less than a minute - probably while I was previewing my post! Does this sort of competitive spirit make me a bad driver?

I can see an online help site giving tips on how to pass the tests.
Or more likely, the ads in the sunday papers, "Get the book which will guarantee you will pass the evaluation. £5.99 + £2.99 postage and packing!"

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

I'm not totally against the idea of psychological profiling of drivers. We certainly do have a minority of drivers with bad attitudes. And they cause a disproportionate number of crashes.

But:

- If they have a bad attitude and we refuse to give them a licence, what's going to happen next, I wonder?

- As someone alluded, people can easily learn to pass 'attitude tests', without changing their true attitude one iota.

- It'd be hard to know that we wre applying the right attitude parameters anyway. As PeterE suggested, heavy rules compliance isn't usually the sign of a safe driver.

***

Damage only crashes outnumber injury crashes by 10:1.
Near misses outnumber damage only crashes by 10:1 (for {some definition of near miss})

So if we can find a way of getting a grip on near miss reporting we have ~100 chances to see the GENUINE risky behaviours and the GENUINE risky people for every injury crash.

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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

And would it weed out the "never had an accident - seen hundreds" type of attitude

One of the worst and arguably most dangerous attitudes on the roads is the desire to control and influence the behaviour of other road users.

_________________
"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

I see the full BBC article includes statements from Dr Lisa Dorn. She's definitiely got some good ideas, and she's far closer to our way of thinking than 99% of the 'road safety establishment'.

Essentially she's working on risk prediction rather than risk management, which I still think is missing a trick, although obviously there's room for such things if accurate.

No one, and I mean no one, in the traditional road safety establishment seems to have noticed that the best risk prediction is in driving history, and that the roads are quite clearly safe enough for us to be able to work on risky people from their crash and near miss and damage only history and pick up problems before they have an injury crash.

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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 don't actually think there's any such thing as a driver who goes around causing crashes without ever getting involved. The problem is that crash scenarios are amazingly unpredictable and once it's going wrong 'anything might happen'. It's therefore extremely unlikely that someone could cause lots of crashes and never get involved. In fact I'd be amazed if there is anyone in the country who as caused ten crashes without suffering damage.

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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

Safe Speed issued the following PR at 10:32 this morning:

PR499: An interesting admission from Mr Gifford...

news: for immediate release

According to the BBC [1]: "Robert Gifford, director of a road safety charity,
told BBC Radio Five Live the current system failed to root out drivers prone to
breaking rules."

Safe Speed says that that's quite an admission. It points to the failure of
speed cameras and modern policy to identify risky drivers.

Paul Smith, founder of SafeSpeed.org.uk, said: "Mr Gifford has been a leading
speed camera proponent. It's extremely interesting to hear him say that the
policy has failed to 'root out drivers prone to breaking rules'."

"What good can speed camera prosecutions be if they don't single out those
prone to breaking rules?"

"Of course, another problem is that 'rules compliance' isn't the proper measure
of a safe driver. If it was, road safety would be easy. Instead road safety is
a complex matter of individual risk management. We could write a million rules,
obey them perfectly, and still fail to observe someone stepping into the road
ahead."

"What's really happening here is that we're seeing the first glimmering
admissions that road safety policy has failed catastrophically. Perhaps it's
time to stop listening to those who are involved in the failure? Department for
Transport is primarily responsible. It is institutionally incapable of
understanding the process of safe driving, and requires radical restructuring."

<ends>

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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'm totally in favour of this kind of thing in theory, but it's hard to think of a way to test people in a fair and objective way without it being too easy to lie and give the expected answers.

Depends on the test but there umpteen "prepare or train yourself" to answer the "pass" way on the market as Ernest has already pointed out.

I think then we have to be careful as to what we are assessing - and so far the best tried and tested means has been the "classroom" sessions with Police Liaison Officers who are starting to work quite closely with schools and colleges in certain parts of the country.

When we learn to drive a car - we are acquiring a set of skills which grant us an earned but still privileged right to drive a car or ride a motorbike. Certain mistakes? We can adjust, correct and learn to avoid in the future. Some of these "low level" mistakes? There can be room for a discreet disciplining and words of polite advice. The more serious? Of course, we are going to try to educate by sanction and penalty - but best if we try to get in a learning curve to prevent future mistakes caused by angry resentment

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Methinks Mr Clifford should be the first test subject !!

Oh, and the test to be made public too.

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Good manners maketh a good motorist

I'm inclined to agree, Peter as seen by the type and number of reports on sites such as betterdriving etc. Rather than attempt to control and influence other drivers (whilst in control of a vehicle), surely a better course of action is to anticipate a drivers manoevre and act accordingly?

The other factor of course is how attitudes change once you have passed a driving test


Familiarity with a car's controls; familiarity with a daily commuter route; general complacency developing - along with individual collections of "bad habits" : all of this changes attitudes gradually over the time from passing the test.

I think we are back to the periodic check ups with some motivator to improve - like something to offset the cost of the assessment as a reward perhaps? plus constant "nagging of COAST reminders


OK - so there's a logic to an attitude test: GFermany's had something like that in place for a while as I understand. But attitudes change as soon as that test gets passed as we all know

_________________
Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

So all those 'unfit' to drive will either:

a) learn to beat the phychometric test (its very easy once you know how they are marked)

b) drive anyway.

I would like to know what "wrong attitude" actualy is.

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Speed camera policy Kills

This gets scarier the more I think about it. What's scary is what the powers-that-be decide constitutes the "wrong attitude". What if you perform otherwise flawlessly, but "fail" the psychometric test?

[tongue very firmly in cheek]Why not extend it to other areas and (for example) ban people with people with the wrong attitude to property (i.e. potential thieves) from shopping centres? I don't mean people with form, just people who psychometric testing have shown may shoplift one day...

Or ban people who don't look like promising parents from having kids? We could even sterilise them too.[/tongue very firmly in cheek]

Thought police at work!!!! This is completely unacceptable. Who determines what the 'right' type of driver is? It's like minority report.

As for holding a driving licence being a privilage please don't get me started! It is no more a privilage that qualifying as a Doctor.

Everyone has the right to drive a vehicle subject to passing a test of competance.