Young driver proposals miss the point says Safe Speed
In the news today are calls for further restrictions on young drivers, including a 'limited' system of graduated licencing and a proposal to raise the minimum driving age to 18.
Safe Speed says these proposal misunderstand the nature of the problem. Road safety is about skills, attitudes and personal responsibility. Restrictions and regulations have limited effects partly because the most dangerous groups will continue to ignore them - but worse than that - the numbers working outside the system will increase.
Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign(www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "We have massive problems with unlicenced and uninsured drivers. Raising the age bar will simply mean more young people sneaking underneath. Many of the problems come from groups working far outside legal norms anyway, so the last thing we should be doing is making those groups bigger."
"We need to build an inclusive system that welcomes young drivers in and gets them properly skilled as quickly as possible. We should start by adding road safety 'skills and responsibilities' classes to citizenship courses in schools.We need to make it clear that a driving test pass is just the first rung on the ladder of a driving career - not the end of learning."
"And we need effective roads Policing to deal with the minority groups who won't observe basic standards of safety and regulation."
"At the moment road safety is caught in a spiral of 'regulate everything', but the results prove that these ideas don't work. Of course they don't work - we need to build risk management skills and we're not doing it. Road safety is already massively dependent on the quality of all our road users as skilled risk managers. But under an onslaught of regulation we're getting worse at managing risk."
In terms of improving skills, we need to focus on the 'thinking skills'described so eloquently in Stephen Haley's recently published book: "MIND DRIVING". And we're not doing that at all.
If we're going to make our roads safer policies need to be 'psychologically sound' and evidence based. We're getting precious little of either because our road safety establishment is regulation obsessed.
