Keeping Young Drivers Alive

After a spate of high publicity fatalities involving young drivers in spectacular crashes, the NSW government has released a discussion paper on ways to curb the carnage.

As the father of three kids who will one day get their licence, I have a close personal interest in the subject.

I'm lucky to have survived my first three years of driving. It was before the introduction of RBT, and the combination of booze, speed and inexperience should have been fatal. I put my survival down to a technical interest in how cars work and perform; experimentation that taught me, by trial and error, the limits of the vehicles I drove; and lashings of luck.

I don't want my kids emulating their father.

It seems teenagers' feelings of invincibility haven't changed much. For every death there must be hundreds of lesser accidents and thousands of near misses. The trick is getting young drivers to survive that first three years of holding a licence.

The government's in the difficult position of trying to curtail the road toll by restricting young drivers, while not being too draconian. They're suggesting the following:

1. Increasing the age of getting a licence to 18;
2. Prohibiting young drivers from driving at night;
3. Restricting the number of passengers allowed to travel with a young driver;
4. Prohibiting young people from driving high powered vehicles;
5. Increasing the training required to obtain a licence.

While these measure have merit, to be effective they need to be enforceable. It's not hard to see measures to restrict hours of driving and passenger numbers being routinely flouted.

Restricting young drivers' access to powerful vehicles appeals to the Daily Telegraph, but many more young drivers are killed in the bog standard family sedan than in high performance vehicles.

The only measure likely to make any significant difference to the road toll is the last in the list, increased driver training. And I'm not talking about passive defensive driver training, although that has an important role to play, but advanced training that teaches a driver to appreciate the limits of their vehicle, and methods to get them out of trouble if those limits are exceeded.

Advanced driver training is resisted by the authorities, who argue that it encourages young drivers to push the limits in general driving. Of course, some will, but they're going to anyway, trained or not. I'd prefer my kids to have some advanced driver skills when they push the limits, as they inevitably will.

Postscript: This issue has a couple of interesting sub-plots besides the issue of the safety of young drivers.

I'll leave these to more qualified writers to explore.