I’m listening to John Gormley Live this afternoon on the topic of graduated licenses for rural vs urban drivers and the wide diversity of failure rates has caught my ear. It seems that community to community and instructor to instructor the rate of failure varies dramatically.
Is this illustrating that Regina or Weyburn breeds worse drivers than Lipton and Eyebrow or is it illuminating a need to examine the testing standards and the criteria to which we hold the instructors and examiners?
Graduated licenses seem doomed to failure simply base on the fact that a large portion of people will drive where and what they choose regardless of what their permit allows. The addition of a graduation seems secondary to the need to improve and standardize instruction and testing. So, I put forward the following postulation, “A properly educated, experienced driver without a valid license is less of a hazard on the road than an inexperienced and licensed, but poorly instructed operator.”.
Possibly we need add as an additional component to the existing practical driving exam and during training a more objective measure of safe driving skill?
Today’s technology would certainly permit the use a driving simulator that puts the candidate into predetermined scenarios where objective scoring would be possible. This could be put into place with the assistance of insurance providers and maybe even technology companies (think MicroSoft and friends…potential advertising mileage for reality based videogames!) and automakers or even health care institutions.
Practice makes perfect and today we are able to practice in the safety of a “virtual” road environment in everyday and emergency situations….just ask Captain “Sully” if he gained all his flying experience practically and think if the lives of your passengers are any less valuable than his.
In Saskatchewan for example, SGI could assist in the placement of two or three mobile SimTesters that could be scheduled around the province.
If this was brought in as a program along with a standardized program of 7 to 10 year retesting of all (not just aged) drivers, the retest fee might assist in the subsidization of the hardware and software needed to maintain this program. Going forward into new vehicle technologies with potential new control interfaces and safety features, simulators of this sort could also be used to maintain and upgrade the skills of not only Saskatchewan drivers, but also our instructors and examiners.
Hey Charles…how about a national driving standard?
Just a thought out of the box…
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