Safe Speed Forums

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 54,00.html



Death rate doubles for young drivers

By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

THE death rate among young drivers has doubled in the past five years, prompting demands for greater restrictions on those who have recently passed their tests.

The steady improvement in road safety across the general population is masking a sharp increase in the number of drivers aged under 20 having fatal crashes, despite a tougher driving test.

A third more young drivers were killed in 2004 than in 2000 despite a halving in the proportion of young people with driving licences. The number of deaths per 100,000 young licence holders has increased from 9.7 in 2000 to 19.2 in 2004.

Many of the crashes involve groups of young people travelling together late at night, often with the driver under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

A study by the AA Motoring Trust found that the growing tendency among young people to defer taking their driving test, far from reducing the danger, could be increasing it. With fewer of the young having licences, they tend to drive in larger groups. Inexperienced drivers are less likely to realise that a heavily laden car is harder to control on bends and has longer braking distances.

The AA research also suggests that there is a greater tendency among young drivers to show off behind the wheel to the growing proportion of their peers who have not passed their tests. The smaller pool of younger drivers means there are fewer available to take turns as the designated driver and avoid alcohol.

Andrew Howard, the AA’s head of road safety, said: “If you are the only person in your group of friends with a licence and always have to do the driving, it may be more tempting to have a drink.”

Many young people are being deterred from taking their driving test because of the rising cost of insurance and new elements in the test that have made it more awkward to pass. An 18-year-old pays an average of £1,700 for car insurance, according to A&A Group, a leading broker.

The Department for Transport introduced a theory test in 1996, a hazard perception test in 2003 and now even requires candidates to have a basic understanding of car maintenance.

The higher proportion of young people going to university means more are putting off learning to drive until after they graduate. Financial constraints are also a factor, with the average novice driver spending £1,162 on lessons and test fees, according to a study published today by Churchill Insurance.

The AA proposes that new drivers should be obliged to sign a code under which they would agree not to drive between midnight and 5am and to limit the number of passengers they carried until they had gained two years’ experience.

Mr Howard said that breaches of the code would be taken into account if drivers committed a motoring offence, with courts issuing harsher penalties.

“A code would be more effective than new laws, as it would be difficult for police to enforce laws restricting young drivers.

Cameras can’t detect how old someone is or how long they have been driving.”

New drivers already face having their licences revoked if they accumulate six penalty points within two years of qualifying.

However, they can simply retake their tests and get back behind the wheel.

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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 09:12 this morning:

PR298: Young drivers need faith and information

news: for immediate release

The Times today reports that the young driver fatality risk has doubled in just
5 years. Safe Speed says that road safety policy is letting them - and the rest
of us - down.

Safe Speed research confirms that road safety is founded upon skills, attitudes
and responsibilities. In large part these factors have been delivered through a
culture - earning us in the UK the safest roads in the world.

* If a driver has the right skills he will recognise risk.

* If a driver has the right attitudes and beliefs he will avoid risk.

* If a driver has the right sense of responsibility he will not cause risk.

Safe Speed believes that making young drivers safer must start in schools. We
need to explain to them the nature of the skills and responsibilities required
for using our roads. At present we're doing nothing like it - we can't make
safe drivers by giving them rules to follow, instead we must teach them how to
survive.

Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign
(www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "Road safety is not a simple matter of vehicle
speeds, instead it's a complex matter of psychology. Current policy based on
speed cameras sends entirely the wrong messages and puts drivers under pressure
- it's bad psychology and doomed to fail."

"Many drivers see that policy is way off track and turn off to all the road
safety messages. Young drivers are especially badly affected because they do
not have experience to fall back on."

"Safe Speed demands an end to road safety based on simple legal compliance and
demands psychologically sound policies based on accurate information leading to
improved risk management. We must measure and manage our national road safety
culture. And we must restore traffic policing and ensure that their role is
dealing with risk-causing behaviour, not simple legal compliance."

<ends>

What we really need to know now is how many of those young driver deaths are unlicenced, and any change in the numbers.

Finding a road safety indicator that doubles or halves in five years is pretty extraordinary. Anyone else got any theories about why?

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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

Speed kills - they all think if they're under the limit they'll be ok? They now just assume if the sign says 60 then they can drive around at that speed (maybe 10 mph lower) on twisty roads and never need to slow down. The whole mantra has been stepped up even more than before and there are numbskull school children that don't believe anything else getting out onto the road.

ABS will also lead to a more lax attitude to braking but it will not help while cornering too quickly and will steal lead to loss of grip but most don't realise this.

More of them are buying new cars than ever before, is this leading to a complacent attitude as they think they won't be hurt if they crash? Are they less aware of the differences in handling between cars and lose it in their old banger as they don't understand how good modern cars are at not letting people hurt themselves?

How many of the accidents took place on recently laid SMA?

How many of the cars had defective suspension - possibly due to road humps? One person local to me lost it on a bumpy road and had worn suspension and one low pressure tyre. These humps damage tyres and damage suspension. If one could assume that road humps would knacker the suspension sufficiently that it wouldn't be noticed with one person in the car but would be downright dangerous with 4 or 5 then could this be the smoking gun that gets every last one of them ripped out?

Are more of them drinking, off their chumps because they know there are no traffic police around anymore?

Lack of public transport on weekends - are more people that used to be feeling giddy on the bus home now in the car with several other people egging each other on?

Has the massive increase in the cost of motoring via insurance, fuel tax and wotnot meant young people just aren't maintaining or checking their cars?

Max power culture? This was around in the eighties with the hot hatch. Are cars the new rebellion where smoking has becoming passe? Young people have little to rebel against as the popular culture is one of rebellion and ignoring authority so they have to take it one step further?

Playstation - they're used to driving around quickly and reacting to things but fail to understand about anticipation buying them much more time than their reactions.

It worries me greatly that the death rate has doubled when cars have got ever safer.

Actually I think the problem may be the diametric opposite:

If you really want a teenager to do something then best tell them it is either illegal, immoral or dangerous. The Government have spent the last ten years telling everyone that speeding is all three, they couldn't have made fast driving more attractive to youngsters if they'd tried!

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That's a crucial factor, of course. If the rate of unlicensed driving was unchanged, but the amount of legal driving had fallen by 33%, then the crude accident risk would increase even if nothing had really changed, because the number of legal drivers is used as the denominator of the formula. In fact I suspect the amount of unlicensed driving will have increased.

It also doesn't adjust for mileage - if fewer young people are learning to drive, those who do will be those who have more motivation to do so, and will probably tend to drive further than the average.

Also there's a kind of reverse Smeed's law in operation here - if you reduce the level of participation in driving, the accident risk for those who do drive will tend to increase.

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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

I wonder if the increased difficulty of the driving test has made those that pass more cocky than they would have been before? They think because they can do a hazard perception test then they must obviously be able to drive safely so they take less care than ever before.

There will be a division between the law abiding who will just stick to the speed limit and the law breakers that will ignore them. The latter group combined with the cockiness are the most dangerous. Having an accident doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest. The local idiots that everyone knows crash continually and have continued near misses and yet they don't seem to change their behaviour or realise they are the problem not other drivers.

Motorists have also been treated badly and considered evil if they even like driving so taking pride in driving well just isn't rewarded and isn't even considered by most people as a worthwhile activity. Changing traffic levels may also be further frustrating young people who are used to getting what they want as they get delayed constantly and may not realise how dangerous 'making up lost time' is.

Was anyone listening to the coverage of this on Radio 5 (Anita Anand's show) tonight? I was less than impressed by the balance of the discussion - seemed as if the studio guests had mostly been chosen for their negative viewpoints on young drivers, fast drivers, and just driving in general. Quite the hypocrites too, with most (all?) of them admitting they'd learned to drive in their teens, yet would quite happily place restrictions on teens today - do as I say, not as I do A few callers/emailers tried their best to put the arguments against curfews, outright bans and other meddling, but the overall impression I got was that Auntie had already made up its mind about the subject, and made sure the discussion mostly went along in that direction with just enough opposition views thrown in here and there so as not to come across as totally biased. Sometimes the BBC can produce works of art, sometimes it just produces Hirsts or Emins...

(with apologies to anyone who actually likes the works of "art" produced by those two individuals )

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Chris

Wildy has already posted this on the thread running over on PH.

We heard CC Meredydd's comments on this on the radio news this evening.

He expressed concern that the young were not listening to the Think! messages..



Well - of course .. they do not appeal. Whilst a pretty little girl springing back to life may appeal to the parents .... (despite the faults in the advert as a whole .. ) - the whole would not cause a 17 year old to THINK! about the reasons for the lollipop speed. Thus - any information film about "dangers of hooning whilst on the lower learning curve in particular" would have to aim at the core of "yoof culture"

His other comment though .. was even more interesting: He said on radio Two News at 7pm



So.. perhaps ..and also red mist and the follies of youth...and of course if you tell a teenager not to do something.. they do it....

Our headache case ... The foster trying and testing me out every step of the way ... I gave him the keys to the drinks cabinet.. he says he does not like my single malt .. it gave him a headache.. He asked me to get some Stellas!

I think he was joking.. I hope he was joking ... ohhhhhhh!

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Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

I cannot agree with your overall argument. There are too many 'if's in it
for it to stand scrutiny when so many young lives are at stake.

Yes, all your individual points - about understanding and responsibilities
and the role of schools - are very valid. I'm sure that young drivers
from good homes and good schools are no great risk to themselves or
others. While those from bad homes and rotten schools ... The
insurance companies know this already and premiums for young drivers
vary massively according to their postcode. But you couldn't build a
background-check into the Driving Test; there'd be street-riots.

I'd endorse the AA's proposals. New drivers should be obliged to sign a
code. They'd agree not to drive between midnight and 5am and there'd
be a limit on the number of passengers they carried. This would be until
they had gained two years’ experience. I'd also set them a very low
breathalyser limit.

I've known of so many fatal accidents involving young drivers. I still feel
very bitter about the frequent deaths of young army-drivers, and their
passengers, during the 1950's when I was abroad as an infantryman.

Everybody knew that some of those youngsters were only in the MT platoon
because they weren't up to other duties, and that they couldn't cope with
missed meals, lack of sleep etc. But nobody in authority cared and the
death-crashes went on.

Young drivers are very vulnerable:
. to missed sleep
. to missed meals
. to small amounts of alcohol
. to other people's demands and priorities
. to other drivers' mistakes - they can't dodge out of trouble

Once they are out on the road they are on their own...

If anything is going to save them it has to be there with them. Sometimes you might get at them with trafpol, but mostly you have to get inside their heads.

If I'd had more time to develop the PR, the headline would have been: "We're letting them down'. And that's what I believe. We're not giving them the real life saving information.

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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 not sure this is hypocritical - surely it is acknowledging the fact that thngs have changed.

We now have faster cars, more of them, AND a whole raft of passenger safety features, and car handling aids, which tempts youngsters with NO EXPERIENCE to imagine that if Michael Schumacher can step out of a 100 mph wreck, so can they.

What type of accidents are these youngsters coming to grief in?

Just looking at our local paper, we seem to get a lot of accidents where no other car is involved, and they leave the road, and end up wrapped around a tree.
Often small cars - metro's, fiestas, and corsa/novas with 5 people in are involved. Failure to understand the change in handling with a full load would seem to be the cause.
Why shouldn't this be tested? Why do we not insist that handling in the wet is TESTED?
It's no use recognising a hazard, if you dont know how to avoid it, or practice it!!

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

Watched an article about this on the BBC news last night, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn't all the usual "oh they speed, this causes accidents". Rather, they were concentrating on the fact that they were good at vehicle control, which made them confident, but very poor at spotting potential hazards, or even if they spotted them, poor at acting on them in a sensible way, just to show off.

That said, a lot of them just drive far too fast. Undertaken at 60mph on a 30mph D2 last night then caught up with him at the next set of lights, WOW what a difference it made to his journey

The change in "fatality rate" is huge, suspiciously so. Are we really talking about an increase in fatalities or does this statistical presentation just give an unusual spin on a fairly stable situation. In other words are more young people dying or not?

_________________
CSCP Latin for beginners...
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Give over, will you?



Not everyone drives fast simply to get to their destination quicker. That's "scamerati thinking"!

_________________
CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

I had a quick squizz yesterday - looks like about a 25% increase in deaths.

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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 guron83, they often drive far too fast for the conditions. Living around the Greater Manchester area, I see it all too often - kids in clapped out Novas, Corsas etc with loud exhausts, usually with other people in the car doing silly speeds down busy areas with parked cars, etc..

For the max power brigade who are possibly the group most at risk, it's the thrill of owning their first or second car and experiencing the culture, showing off to their peers, the ignorance of youth, and the feeling of indestructiblity. Often drink and drugs are involved which escalates the situation.

Would the government then compensate any new (hang on, are you talking about new or young drivers here?) drivers who lost their job as a result of this curfew period being introduced? What about new drivers who would have started a job which required them to drive during the curfew, but could no longer apply for such a job-would they receive any compensation or assistance in finding a job which fits around the curfew?

I do like the idea of removing the inexperienced show-offs and risk-takers from the roads, but I remain to be convinced that the problem is so bad, particularly overnight, that it warrants a blanket ban on all new drivers. Especially when the side-effects of such a ban don't seem to have been fully investigated. Introducing an overnight curfew isn't going to get the show-offs off the roads-they'll just go out earlier (or simply ignore the curfew-exactly how would it be enforced anyway...), and it won't stop new drivers being able to/having to drive in the dark, but it may encourage them to push it a bit in order to get home before the curfew comes into effect.

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Chris

Yes but none of this is new. Like it or not recklessness is an inherent part of male teenagerdom - we did it, our fathers did it (speaking collectively)! It doesn't explain what is causing this sudden "ski jump" rise in fatalities?

So what are the specific things that have escalated over the last few years? Drug-taking? Lack of traffic Police? Speed Cameras encouraging them off the safe roads and onto the ones where it is unsafe to speed? High insurance costs pushing them all into cars with poor crash protection? Lack of other outlets for their need for adrenaline release? Whatever, it isn't simply recklessness - that was there all along...

_________________
CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

Sorry meant to say S2 (single carriageway).

I must agree with JT. I don't know what the average age on this board is, but I'd guess that I'm at the younger end of the scale. Sure I've done some stupid things, but, as JT says, my fathers and uncles all have stories about moments of stupidity as do the generation before them.

I'm not sure I agree with the clapped out banger arguement either, as most of the stories I hear from decades before involve equally crap cars.

Personnally I think the difference is caused by the opposite end of the scale. Even crap cars these days rival 60's sports cars for performance. Cars these days often have ABS and/or airbags (false sense of security??)

There will obviously be some influence from drink/drugs under some circumstances, and it may be most case?? I don't know, and it's unlikely to be something a road safety campaign group can cure on their own.

Many fatals round my way are infact youngsters driving rural roads alone and crashing. In these cases I think it's modern (even clapped out Novas are more modern than the "old bangers" the older generation drove in their youths) cars allowing youngsters to get themselves into far more trouble than earlier cars could.

Comparing older cars which managed 0-60 in what? 20-25seconds?? to modern small cars which manage 0-60 around maybe 13-14seconds?? it's easy to see that modern cars can make crashes happen faster.

As for the last couple of years, well I personnally feel it's because BiBs don't really exist. Even as a daft teenager myself there was a temptation to think "dodge the cameras and I'm fine".

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