Safe Speed Forums

A simple revelation, but a revelation none the less.

We learn to drive on the road. Learning to drive isn't about a driving instructor or a driving test, it's about actually doing it and learning from our mistakes.

But learning requires context and background - or at least it does in this case. Drivers who skid and crash usually say: "It all happened so fast, there was nothing I could do." They lack the key information (skids can be controlled and avoided) and they FAIL TO LEARN from the experience.

How easy it would be for us to feed key information to drivers and improve their ON THE ROAD learning.

Just think - a simple phrase of genuine key information, given to drivers NOW could feed into an individual's learning process and contribute to his avoiding a crash in 20 years' time.

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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

Well, yes and no. Without some sort of driving tuition we'd not know the basics of vehicle control, postitioning and such like. You need the basics before you can move on.



A friend of mine has said this for years. We learn to drive with a driving instructor, we pass our test and then we really learn to drive in the real world.

Agreed, but unfortunately there's no feedback loop. We don't reassess to check what is being learnt.


Kaz

I think the feedback exists, unfortunately most don't recognise it for what it is...feedback on the error they made for example. As a result drivers go around believing errors are things other people commit - how often do you hear "There was nothing I could do to avoid X,Y,Z"?
What someone uttering this familiar line usually fails to accept is that the reasons for them not being able to do anything lie within their own shortcomings, eg a failure to apply COAST and, as a result, place themselves into an irreversable situation.

Yes, yes, YES! And that leads us to a simple cheap and effective way to improve road safety. We just have to tell people that:

a) They aren't perfect
b) How to recognise their own mistakes
c) How to learn from those mistakes

I'm doing a lot of background work in this area at the moment.

One aspect is that I'm (slowly) defining a group of key facts that are "learning enablers". If drivers know these facts, especially in a nemonic form, we might be able to considerably enhance the speed and quality of the vital "on-the-road" learning.

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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

Your diary idea is a good way to start - evaluate every drive. We also need those adverts on the telly- and a high profile on this site on good driving practices.

You already have this forum, and pages on braking and ditching tailgaters.

We could do with page on COAST

And advice on Cornering, using gears, acceleration...developing hazard awareness, road worthiness checks, etc....

My eldest son passed his test last week.

Lessons were as follows:

Applied for provisional and he took the theory test on his 17th birthday and passed.

Gave him time to get over the excitement and block of 12 lessons were booked at different times of day with RAC. Kid drove in rush hour, calmish hours, A roads, etc. We had three lessons in one day at one point.

Then out with various members of this family in a lot of different cars on mix of A road DCs, NSL rurals as well.... (he is lucky - all petrolheads here - and IG went out with him a few times ) Admit to being nervous when he drove my "toys" though

Had him out at dusk and for a night drive too.

Made him evaluate each drive too afterwards. If he made any error - got him to think through to what he actually did. If he saw example of bad driving (and he saw plenty ) - we got him to explain why he thought the standard was poor and what he would have done - had he been in that car.

Then back to RAC for another block of 6 lessons just to make sure we had not taught him something daft

Since his test - took him on long motorway drive with me in passenger seat in my car (Must be mad - letting him drive a J-J-Jag om a m-m-motorway...) . Lad performed well - steady speed of 67 mph - adjusted for road works.

He is currently on Pass Plus.

Skid pan/ braking course have been booked for him and it is highly likely this young man will tackle an IAM without any encouragement from us.

But I think we need to get across that driving is like any other skill - it needs practice to perfect - and once we have achieved a particular skill - we need to practise and constantly retrain it to maintain the polish.

There's a great deal of material written for an "advanced driving manual" but I've been completely stalled by the diagram requirement for about 2 years now. I think it's 220 diagrams, (and I'm not a very talented diagram creator). I've simply never found the time. If someone finds me resources (cash / staff etc) I'll get it back up to the top of the priority list.

I could do a bit here and a bit there. Maybe a COAST page. Or maybe I'll publish more of Steve Haley's very interesting stuff instead. Did you see:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/sss.html ?



If only everyone was so enlightened. I wonder what the road fatality rate would be? 10% of the present value or less I reckon.

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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

Have you ever managed to get any figures on the accident rate of the "best" 10% of drivers compared with the "average" and the "worst 10%"?

Also it is an interesting question to what extent accidents result from what is blatantly "bad" driving as opposed to "normal" drivers making errors of judgment.

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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

First question, no - I do have a dig from time to time, but I don't find much data. The insurance companies obviously know, but they regard the information as "commercially sensitive" and they're not talking. We need to put numbers to this graph:



And then we need to go on to apply different treatments to the three main groups. (lower, large middle and upper).

Second question - also very interesting. But again, no answer. Sorry.

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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

Yes, I know we've discussed this before and they're rhetorical questions - but knowing the answers would have a large impact on road safety policy.

I tend to think there would a law of diminishing returns with improved driver training, so however much you did, assuming human nature did not change, that alone would only improve casualties by maybe 10%. That's not to say it's not worth doing, but it's not a 90% panacea or anywhere near it.

Also you would need to separate out the effects of improved training from those of possibly reducing the number of licensed drivers. Those who were deterred would not necessarily be the less capable drivers, but rather those with either less motivation to drive or less time and money.

A large reduction in the driving population would also move people to potentially more dangerous modes such as walking and pedal cycling. If there were half the number of cars on the road, with no change in quality of driver or pedestrian behaviour, we would probably kill a lot more pedestrians each year.

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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

The roads in Belgium have 4x our casualty rates.

The only difference I can find is the cultural one, and most of that is in "road safety culture".

I can find absolutely no reason why we can't be 4 times better than we are by extrapolating from Belgium to the UK and beyond. (if you see what I mean.)

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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

Really? That bad?


Yes, what I've said isn't a counsel of despair, but there is a lot more to a road safety culture than just training. Another is taking a dispassionate view of accident causation and distinguishing "cause" from "blame".

Also I believe that Belgium didn't have driving tests at all until the 1970s, so it still has a lot of drivers who have never taken a test. There is a large initial safety gain from introducing basic testing, but the more testing is extended beyond that level, the less the additional gain will be.

Germany, as we have discussed, has considerably more stringent driver testing than the UK, but even so a higher (though more rapidly improving) casualty rate.

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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

Mad Moggie, I'm impressed! That's a great methodical way to learn to drive. I've one piece of advice. Tell your eldest son to consider going for any of the ROSPA Advanced Drivers awards before joining the IAM. It'll mean more lessons with a professional instructor, but he may consider it worthwhile. Have a look at the RoADA website.

Cheers!

We want him to be safe - and certainly do not want to be pacing floors worrying about him when he is due in and a bit late. (No doubt we will anyway - human nature. My parents used to stay up until I got back home - when I was his age. Even whilst at Uni - when I went home for vacs and odd weekends with my stored up washing for Ma to do. Bet he will be just the same... )


Without doubt the young chap will looking into ROSPA etc as well. Bit of a petrolhead ... more into cars and driving ... than wimmin and football.


Yes Paulie - taken peek at the Steve Haley page ... more please!

Picture this:

1) Experience means learning by making mistakes.
2) Mistakes may or may not be recognised as such depending on knowledge.
3) Learning only takes place when mistakes are understood.
4) Two components to understanding a mistake are analysis and knowledge.
5) An experienced driver has become experienced by making a huge number of mistakes.
6) What proportion of those mistakes did the experienced driver learn from? I bet it's 10% or less.
7) How do we improve the figure in number 6? By helping drivers to recognise and understand mistakes.
8) How do we help drivers to recognise and understand mistakes?
9) By giving names and descriptions to all the common mistakes and telling him about them before he makes them.

I'm definitely onto something here...

See how the new hazard perception test fits the pattern? They learn bugger all about driving from the hazard perception test when they take it, but it provides the knowledge required to REALLY learn from a hazard perception failure later. I wonder if the designers of the hazard perception test know this?

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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

How true! Something as simple as stalling the engine, flooding the engine and choosing the wrong gear can be corrected by a simple explanation on mechanics. Nothing to elaborate - but basic knowledge can and does help here.




If they failed to see something until last minute - encourage the question why? SMIDSY - dues to car design? foliage? road furniture?

My eldest when just 16 read through the HC - and on the paragraph about skids ... looked up and asked "Steer into skid? How many understand this?" (Astute lad!) Cue the excuse to go karting and practising sliding....

"Keep a two second rule"

How many know how to calculate this? Found I had to remind the RAC man to actually run through formally this with my lad.

Parallel parking - after a few messes on first attempt lesson whereby William managed to bump the kerb - he was then asked to look at how and why he was misjudging the space.



Prior to the provisional licence - we encouraged William to look at each car on the road - especially the ones which caused his Mama to murmer "twazak" - and to tell us why he thought his Mama was calling the person that name. It helps focus as to potential hazards and defence mechanisms. In a way - bit like training the basics of Green Cross Code - you set the example and explain each time they are out with you.



The hazard perception is good idea in principle. We purchased the DVD stuff for William and the twins (now 15) to use. Once they had twigged how to use the mouse to score the points....(that is a real hazard - some older learners could fail this because they are unused to computer games), we got them to replay the clips and try to work out why the hazard occurred and could it have been avoided. In other words - exploit at all times and develop with the learner in the houshold.

An enlightened approach indeed.

But I was really thinking about ordinary drivers who completely lack that excellent kind of support.

2 years after the test. Out on the road. Something happens.

Has he got a voice in his head repeating some key phrase to explain the "something"? If he does he learns. If he doesn't he doesn't learn.

It's up to us to create and disseminate those key phrases - obviously the powers that be are not thinking right at present.

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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

Rigpig wrote


A friend of mine has said this for years. We learn to drive with a driving instructor, we pass our test and then we really learn to drive in the real world[quote]

From my experience,and i live near a driving centre an have one daughter with a pass in the past few years and onother learning
the learning bit at the start should be learning to drive to prove that you are competant to pass the test and drive safely - in days of yore after passing your test older relatives would help kick start the very necessary next bit - learning to drive.
After holding a licence for a long time, having driven almost every type of road in the uk, from forestry commission tracks with the hazards of sheep/deer and fallen logs to a high percentage of the country's M /WAYS, IWOULD AGREE ON MOST OF WHAT HAS BEEN SAID,

BUT THE DAY I STOP LEARNING WILL BE THE DAY I DECIDE I AM NOT CAPABLE OF DRIVING.
ANY DRIVER WHO WISHES TO BE A BETTER/SAFER DRIVER SHOULD NOT BE TOO PROUD TO LISTEN TO THE OPINIONS ABOUT THEIR DRIVING -LISTENING AND ACTING ON IT MIGHT JUST CURE A FAULT.

ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF THIS FORUM IS THE IMPARTING OF INFORMATION.

I think you could add that experience is gained by seeing other people make mistakes. People are generally spectators, with few taking the time to reflect on there own actions but commonly hasty to criticise others. I think you can also improve you own safety by learning to anticipate what other road users are likely to do, this too can be done by observation rather than by being involved.
Regardless of these points however we are talking about the need for drivers to LEARN and that requires a positive effort on the part of the driver. Quite frankly I do not believe many drivers are willing to make the effort "I've past my test, I can drive". Another large group will simply not realise they need to learn more "Accidents happen to other people"
This takes us to the graph, if a system is not in place to identify the drivers on the left of the graph there is a very good chance they themselves do not know they are the worst of the drivers, so how do you target the education. If you simply try to educate everyone there is a good chance the only ones who will LEARN are already tending to be towards the right of the graph as they have realised there is a need to learn. So the best get better whilst the worst remain blissfully ignorant

Sorry Paul but I have to disagree on this one. this is learning to pass a test or carry out a drill not learning to implement a skill. Driving is very much a skill and a complex interaction, I would hazard a guess that most of the good drivers haven't so much forgotton the basics but don't need to think about them any more. How did that happen? How did the good drivers become good drivers? How did you discover that it's a good idea to hang back in L2 when an L1 vehicle is closing on the vehicle in front and is that always the case? I would hazard a guess that you can tell when a car is going to pull out in front of you from a side road, not always but sometimes you just know. How? The real improvements in driving don't come from the mechanics and dare I say there are drivers who religiously mirror signal mirror manoeuvre and will carry out the manoeuvre regardless of what they see in the mirror.

I agree with your experience thread but is it really possible to pass on experience. Given the complexities of driving and the multitude of factors than need to be accounted for there arn't many definate rules you could put a phrase to.