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Staying Safe on the Roads This Coming Easter
One of the privileges of this role is being able to discuss and gain insights from some of the world’s leading road safety experts. The feedback received is information that can help keep you and your family safe this during the Easter holiday period.
One of the most important things to do is engage in responsible defensive driving – using compensatory strategies (e.g. maintaining a safe braking distance behind the car in front of you). You may also consider enrolling in a high-quality practical defensive driving course – it’s a good investment.
Sadly there have been what I personally consider to be some flawed conclusions and publicity associated with advanced driving courses. I have heard some road safety proponents argue that research indicates that advanced driving courses lead to over-confidence and hence increase the likelihood of the driver being involved in a motor vehicle collision. I am quite happy to accept the premise that a high-performance driving course could well lead to driver over-confidence and hence increase collision risk. Indeed I have witnessed exactly such an example of dangerous over-confidence myself and politely avoided accepting a lift from a driver who’d recently undergone such a course.
I believe that the problem lies in categorising all the different types of advanced driving courses available as being the same, specifically taking the findings from advanced high-performance driving courses and mistakenly extrapolating the findings and deeming them to being relevant to advanced defensive driving courses.
A proper defensive driving course is designed to dispel over-confidence by allowing the driver to experience just how quickly and badly things can go wrong and developing defensive driving strategies to help avoid getting into a bad situation in the first place. Building the driver’s repertoire of compensatory strategies to help them deal with the likely scenarios of what can reasonably be expected to go wrong out on the open road.
That is why we refer to our courses as Low Risk Driving courses. We also very strongly advise people to seek cognitive assessment and training.
So where does enhanced cognition fit in? Dealing with the unexpected. Both experience and defensive driving courses teach us what we can expect to go wrong and how to deal with it. That being said, out on the road most emergencies are unexpected – somebody somehow has done something really stupid. It is then up to your cognitive processes to perceive, interpret and respond to the situation quickly and accurately enough to avoid the collision. This is not conscious thought, this is pure processing speed, and this is why cognitive training is a beautiful complement to practical defensive driving training and strategies.
Call us today about driver training that can assess and improve cognitive abilities.
We wish you all a happy and safe Easter.
New study finds that boredom provokes 31% of drivers to take unnecessary risks
Researchers at Newcastle University (UK) found that drivers who didn’t find the highways taxing enough were more prone to speeding or overtaking as they sought excitement. As a result the researchers suggest that making roads more complicated by building in more obstacles could actually make them safer.
The researchers draw some other interesting conclusions:
- They described 35% of the driving population as enthusiastic drivers – persons who find driving more challenging and intrinsically interesting. Because they enjoy driving they are calmer and therefore are less likely to have an accident.
- 31% were described as “easily bored, nervous and dangerous” and these people were more likely to have an accident (seeking excitement through risk-taking driving activity).
Comments made by the lead researcher – Dr Joan Harvey – and Edmund King (president of the AA and Visiting Professor of Transport) also throw up interesting perspectives on how efforts to make roads safer and vehicles easier to drive may (in some instances) increase the risks that drivers take because they’re not sufficiently mentally engaged in the task at hand.
For more information on this study please follow this link to the Newcastle University (UK) Press Release
This is just one reason why our bush tracks are safer than improved roads, a point I’ve been trying to make to the Cook Shire Council for some time with respect to the Starke to Kalpower Road.
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