He must know what he's talking about, but it sounds a bit hopeless to me. Canadian boffin Dr Rick Clapton reckons that driver training efforts are wasted:
I now think all the resources put into driver education have failed,he says.It's not working. Actually, a number of studies show that drivers with driver education have higher crash records than those drivers who don't have driver training.
That may well be so, but how can he be truly convinced that driver education isn't going to reduce the road death and injury toll in any significant way
?
Because:
Although traffic death rates have fallen since the late 1960s, crash and injury rates have remained constant in the countries he studied. Clapton says it's an indication that, despite greater emphasis on training, driving behaviour hasn't changed much in recent decades.
Dr Clapton prefers to look to technology for the solution. But this is also problematic:
We can't always predict how technology will affect driver behaviour,he says.A significant majority of people derive a sense of power from driving, and people with air bags and other safety devices almost always drive more aggressively because they feel safer.
That would be the ol' risk compensation effect at work, I guess. And surely that endangers his argument about crash and injury rates, doesn't it? It's a major complicating factor: driver training may well be effective, but it might just be that risk compensation is a more efficient influencer of people's behaviour. That doesn't mean we should give up on training for drivers (of any road vehicle).
Dr Clapton may well have some good scientific evidence to support his claim but the University of British Columbia report is a bit light-on in this area. So in the absence of any other than opinion I, for one, am not prepared to accept that driver training is totally inffective.
Yeah, it's the very complexity of the situation that I was driving at here. I haven't yet got hold of Dr Clapton's research on this issue (the UBC report doesn't help in this regard) but I don't agree with his reasoning (at least, as it is presented in this report)—the conclusion seems too absolute.
Driver training may actually be quite effective but, as Crowlie points out, idiot training is far more plentiful.
We rest our case; http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,0a17217a264004,00.html
Oh, yeessss! Nice one!
Hello Everyone:
If you are interested in reading the article, it will be published at the end of the month in an Australian journal entitled "Traffic". I would be more than happy to provide you with a complete version of the article. Simply drop me an email.
Cheers Rick
I'll take up that offer from Rick—stay tuned for further comment.
Comments
Looks like the psychology with this, as in so many other situations, is complex. I don't believe that increased penalties and stricter road laws will reduce the road toll because you can't legislate against being a dickhead.
There's so much bad info being fed to people in the form of car ads and insane driving films, and people are less and less taught to distinguish between reality and fantasy in our culture.
You can spend some time doing a driver education course, but then spend 100 times that much time watching car chase flicks and all those ads on tellie where a car driver is king of the road, and the differences will add up.
Sure we should all be more rational and considerate, but humans are a visual animal and the best psychologists in the world work in advertising.
What it all boils down to is that it's a dangerous thing to have a tired/distracted/emotional human in control of 800 odd kilo's of metal, driving around, regardless of air bags, seat belts or other stuff.