MOTOR MOUTH
KEY TO BEING A GOOD TEEN DRIVER IS PERCEPTION, NOT SKILL
It turns out that pretty much everything I thought I knew about driver training was wrong. Like so many parents, as soon as my basement troll turned 16, I enrolled him in every driver-training course I could find. Skid control school? Check. Emergency accident avoidance techniques? Absolutely. Winter driving instruction? Get behind the wheel, sonny boy. I even got him into a — admittedly it was as much Christmas present as educational instruction — BMW Performance Driving School, which emphasized handling a car in emergency situations at high speeds.
My logic was the experience he lacked in the real world could be made up with the concentrated tutelage of track instruction.
What I accomplished was the exact opposite, says the International Road Federation, an organization that studies the effectiveness of driver training. Indeed, according to the IRF, my ministrations all but guaranteed he would have an accident.
It’s no mystery that young drivers, especially testosterone-filled males, are over-represented in accident statistics. In the United States, some six teenagers die every day in car accidents. In Canada, road crashes account for about 30 per cent of all deaths for young adults between the ages of 16 and 24. Nor is this only a North American problem.
Overall, the average for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries shows that young make up 27 per cent of all driver fatalities, despite accounting for only 10 per cent of the driving population.
Now, here’s the kicker: According to the IRF, having driver skills training — especially those emergency skillbased programs such as skid control, etc. — actually increases the likelihood your offspring will be involved in an automobile accident.
“But,” I can hear you saying, “that simply doesn’t make any sense.” And you’d be absolutely right; it doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. Surely, the eggheads have it wrong. It would seem plain, ordinary common sense — at least viewed through a parental lens, now partially panicked — that the reason teenagers are so vulnerable is they lack experience behind the wheel.
How can they know, for instance, that you steer into a skid if they haven’t practised steering into skids? Ditto for brake-and-swerve accident-avoidance manoeuvres, how to operate anti-lock brake systems in emergency situations and the multitude of other skills experienced drivers take for granted. After all, that is why we, as concerned parents, send those nearest and dearest to us to driver’s school.
Yet the IRF is adamant about the premise of its entire report that trainingprogramsgearedtoenhancingthe “skills to regain control in emergency situations should not be included in basic driver education nor in posttest driver-training programs.”
Andithasnumberstobackitsseemingly counter-intuitive assertion. Studies in Norway and Finland have shown a direct correlation between skid-recovery training and increased crashes among novice drivers. A similar study in Oregon estimated such training doubled the likelihood of the young driver being in a collision. Oneanalysisevenreportedemergency skills training for ambulance drivers actually increased their crash rate by 45 per cent.
According to the IRF, the most important criterion for safe driving is a perfect balance between risks and capabilities, regardless of what those capabilities are.
Actually, it’s even deeper than that: Safe driving is the balance between risks and perceived capabilities. Indeed, says the IRF, it’s only when “both the perceived capabilities completely coincide with the real capabilities and the perceived risks completely coincide with the real risks” that a driver is said to be “well calibrated,” the goal of every modern driver-training program.
The IRF says what skills training does is counterproductive, namely imbuing “overconfidence (that) eliminates normally cautious behaviour.”
Not only that, those quickly learned skills tend to erode over time and will “not be readily available in emergency situations one or two years later.”
So, for instance, when it’s dark and it snows, says the IRF, a “driver who has attended skid training may think, ‘I have learned to control a car in difficult circumstances,’ (although he or she has actually already lost those skills) and drive.” But someone who has not attended such a course may think, “I’m not such a good driver and I cannot control a car on slippery roads and will stay home.”
So, if enhancing driving skills are not effective, what does work?
Well, besides graduated licensing, which tends to phase in the responsibility of driving, or raising the minimum age for driving to 18, as some European countries do, it would seem the greatest boon to driving safety is teaching novice drivers to recognize dangerous situations. Indeed, if I am reading these studies correctly, it turns out that what’s killing our teenagers isn’t so much that they don’t know what to do in an accident, it’s they don’t recognize an accident is about to happen.
Perception isn’t a key teenage strength. Just as numerous studies reveal teens have a difficult time “reading” facial expressions that adults quickly decipher, virtually all research into the perils of driving indicates teens simply have trouble perceiving the dangers of driving. The good news is some of the same papers reveal driving simulators that focus on recognizing and avoiding critical situations are far more effective than trying to imbue our callow youth with the skills of a race car driver. And such lessons have the added benefit of being far safer than on-road instruction.
From an adult perspective, it may be hard to believe your progeny can’t recognize danger. I certainly had a hard time wrapping my head around it. Who couldn’t, for instance, see a loaded-to-the-gills pickup barrelling up to a stop sign might warrant a little extra attention? Your teenager, as it turns out.
Showing our kids how to avoid accidents is not going to save lives. Teaching them how to recognize danger might.