There must be stats out there for California, since so many of us take traffic school when we get tickets.
Put 'em in jail:
That worked so well to stop illegal drugs and guns.
if you get a license at 18 without taking drivers ed your insurance is much much higher than if you get it at 18 after drivers ed, there is no way in hell an insurance company would cut a break without the stats to back it up.
the stats I have suggest a 30% decrease in crashes in the over the first couple years. and if you have a kid who gets 120+ hours driving the crash rate drops by about another 30%
the problem is we are generally talking about teenagers who are the highest risk group there is, if you take a group of say 25 year olds I am positive the results would stand out.
I think the problem is that parents don’t take an active part in teaching their kids to drive. Once they have their learners permit, you have to go out their with them in ALL kinds of situations. Not just to the grocery store and back.
I was lucky, I started driving trucks and tractors as young as 10. By the time I got my drivers licence, I knew how to operate cars with out a thought. Throwing in more traffic than I was used to still takes a lot of skill.
I’ve been driving for nearly 17 years now (not counting time with a learner’s permit) and I’m not sure what benefit I could gain from a refresher course. Granted I’m not all that good at parallel parking because I’ve never had to do it but what else could I gain from a refresher course? What makes it worth the expense and time on my part?
I was unaware that insurance companies offered discounts to people who took refresher courses. Not counting those who get tickets and attend those courses to help square things with their insurance companies.
Odesio
Yes, it is. I don’t know that there is anything that driver’s ed would have been able to teach me that I could only learn by going to driver’s ed. It took me about 20 minutes with the PA driver’s manual to learn enough of the laws, regulations, and signage to pass the permit test without missing any questions. I practiced driving for about 3 months with my parents, and then took my driving test to get my license.
Since then, my driving record is absolutely clean. No tickets, no accidents, nothing. For over fourteen years.
And in Britain, it’s pretty easy for most of the people to get around on public transportation. That is not the case in rural Pennsylvania, where the inability to drive is a severe handicap to the ability to have a job. If someone doesn’t requalify for their driver’s license here under your testing scheme, you’re potentially making them unemployable for a year.
And I’m telling you, many of them will put their ability to provide food and shelter first, and drive anyway.
Yes, I do have an idea of how many people die in car carshes every day. Yes, I know that many of them (although I’d like to see a cite for your 90%+ figure) could have been avoided. I consider it an acceptable risk that I take every time I go out the door.
What kind of value are you going to provide in ‘a few hours’ that would make such a refresher course even worthwhile? And what’s it going to cost me?
Great idea. Let’s invest a huge amount of resources to go out and find people who are driving cars without licenses solely because the licensing rules were changed so as to make it difficult enough to renew a driver’s license that it interferes with their abiity to provide for their own and their family’s basic needs, and then stuff them into the already overcrowded jails where they can spend time with real, actual criminals and be at risk of being attacked, beaten or raped. We’ll probably need to build some more jails to hold all these people, so let’s raise taxes even more, and make everyone suffer!
Out of 300,000,000. I’m not seeing the dire need here.
Great idea. Let’s once again disproportionally burden the poor who have little ability to pay such an increase in taxes, and who in many cases have already limited their driving to necessity only.
Now you’re going to pay premium dollars to have the DMV open on Sunday? Good luck with that.
I have news for you about their ability to turn their brain off for a few hours over two days. You start forcing 30 and 40 year old adults who have been driving for 14 - 24 years and have not had an infraction or accident into traffic school, and you’re going to get a bunch of people who, if they show up at all, will spend the entire time there thinking about how the government is ripping them off by forcing them to spend their weekend taking some bullshit class where they will learn nothing of any value.
It’s not worth the 30$ a year difference in my car insurance. I get a bigger discount for having renter’s insurance than I would if I took driver’s ed.
At 16 years old, my insurance was about 100$/year more than it would have been if I took driver’s ed. I got around this by purchasing life insurance from the same company. Got a multi-policy discount that was worth 200$ a year. It actually covered the cost of the life insurance (at 7$ a month) and netted me a bigger discount than taking driver’s ed.
Where are you getting these statistics?
Then get some numbers and prove it.
Also, is your Shift key broken?
Are you a traffic cop or a driving instructor? Otherwise you’re just telling us that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Are you?
If you’re going to make that a qualification for having an opinion in this thread, let’s see your credentials.
It’s actually 10 working days, not a year.
I don’t think having to wait a year would be all that practical.
The US laws for obtaining a driving license for the most part seem pretty lax compared to the UK, and compared to somewhere like Finland you also have to take a course that includes surfaces with bad grip, such as skid pan training.
The UK test is in 3 parts, everyone has to do it, the theory test - 50 questions of which you must get 43 correct, the hazard perception where you watch a video playback and hit a button when you first notice a hazard that will require some sort of driver intervention - I cannot remeber the figures but each incident has a declining score rate, you get higher scores for spotting the hazard early.
Finally you get to do the drving test on the road itself.
It usually takes around 40 hours of instructor training plus at least the same again under adult supervision, say from a family member.
It can easily cost £500 to do all the tuition and all the tests, and if you fail it can cost rather more than that.
New drivers, of any age, have a probationary period of 2 years, where they must not not acquire more than 6 points of bad driving or they will be disqualified and have to retake the test. A driver who is out of their 2 years probation is allowed to get 12 point on their licence before being banned for a set period of time
When you get nicked for bad driving/speeding etc over here you get a certain, number of points awarded against you, collect enough and you are banned, not only that but once you have served you ban, you will find that your insurance becomes very expensive, I have seen people quoted over £2000 for car insurance.
Badly behaved drivers can find that it takes some time before insurance prices fall to reasonable levels, get yourself banned for drink driving and higher insurance premiums alone will cost you thousands of £ before they finally come back down to sensible figures a few years later. This of course does not begin to take account of the fines that can be imposed by the courts.
It is expensive to learn to drive over here, and even more expensive to be banned from drving, it can cost you your work, and it can cost you for several years in increased costs.
When you start looking at internation accident rates per standardised rate, not all countries can be readily compared due to the variable nature of accident reporting, however, when you look at the OECD figures, by nation, this is a resonably standardised set of statistics, and the US out of all the developed economies is strikingly bad, running in at 27 in the list of developed nations as a percapita death rate, and even in terms of miles driven its not particularly good either.
http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/statistics/multi-country_death-rates_1988-2001.htm
Heres your figures by each US state, and that overall US rate actually masks some truly appalling figures, and plenty of US states have low figures, which makes the bad ones bring up the average dramatically.
It would be interesting to compare look and see which US states have the highest standards of driver training against the accident figures.
http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/statistics/stats-multicountry-percapita-2004.htm
While, I agree that we would be better off if Driver’s Ed were better at teaching safe driving, why is it important that the course be harder? I don’t think making it harder means that more people would learn more. I am fine with it being easy as eating pie if it does a good job at turning out safe drivers.
Lee raises a good point. I don’t necessarily care about driver’s ed. What I really want is for the driving test to be harder. Much harder. And you should actually have to retake it periodically to make sure people don’t get complacent.
Right now, US drivers ed is a cakewalk because the test is a cakewalk, and people don’t see the point in suffering through some challenging driver training when 99.999% of their driving will also be a cakewalk.
However, it’s probably only partly related to the driver’s license being easier to get. For instance, getting a license in France and in the UK seems to be equally difficult, long and costly (around € 1 000), with a significant failure rate (I should know, I failed 4 times). However the death toll on French roads still used to be appalling by comparison with the UK. I wrote “used to” because I know it decreased a lot during the recent years, so it’s possible that now the comparison isn’t as unfavourable. But the significant improvement, as far as I can tell, wasn’t a result of making driver’s Ed more difficult, but of a much harsher treatment of road delinquency.
And reading this board, it seems to me that American authorities are much more lenient with bad drivers, much more reluctant to suspend a driver’s license or ban people from driving, and that even when a license is suspended, people are much more likely to still drive without one. So, the bad statistics might be more related to a lack of repression than to an insufficient training of young drivers.
current courses are full of useless crap that has no place in a drivers ed class and often leave out or only address in the most basic ways important things that could easily be added to a curriculum. that combined with stupidly easy “tests” and little to no challenging content leaves many students feeling that they learned nothing in drivers ed. at one place I worked I tried explaining to the owner that his quiz’s at the end of each class were completely pointless and did nothing to show the kids learned or were paying attention. when he didnt believe me I taught one course where I gave out the test right at the start of class instead of at the end…the pass fail rate was only slightly changed and then it was because of a few questions with super specific answers. most schools only teach one way to change a lane, never even addressing heavy traffic, sudden slow downs, faster to slower or slower to faster lanes they just teach rear view mirror, signal, side mirror, blind spot as if that magically covers anything but the most simplistic lane change. safe driving is not easy and there is no easy way to teach it and be sure to get the message across, there is however a better way.
I have actually been working on a new curriculum for a few years now and I am in the process of putting together a business plan and looking for investors/loans to get things going so you could say I have some idea whats going on here.
and Catsix if you really want to know the things you can only learn in a drivers ed course you are pretty much going to have to take one, I teach a 34 hour course, its not like I can just type it out for you. as for the 90% of crashes being easily avoidable? what do you think causes crashes? meteors falling from the sky? almost every single crash is caused directly or indirectly by human error. and the indirect ones are just as dumb as the direct ones. here in Seattle a few years ago a guy in a work vehicle lost his brakes going down a very very steep hill and ended up rolling his truck and hitting several cars in the process, he didnt do anything wrong but the company mechanic was telling people he was doing the maintenance work and even listed a brake inspection on that very vehicle…when he was really out golfing and crap like that. a buddy of mine was involved in a head on collision with some genius with no steering wheel in his pick up, just a pair of vice grips clamped onto the end of the steering column, which naturally fell off while he was driving at 35 on a public road. I dont have online cites for all of this, since I teach this stuff I kind of have an inside line on a lot of it, but its not hard to find decent stats on crashes and things like that. and as someone posted above the US has craptacular scores across the board when it comes to driver behavior.
When I take my refresher courses for flying airplanes I’ve never had to take even 1 hour off from work, much less “days”. I can’t imagine that a refresher course for driving a car would require a week off work!
Personally, I’d like to see driver’s licenses treated more like pilot’s licenses - requirements for classroom instruction, a serious test rather than the crap multiple choice you get for driving, minimum number of instructional hours behind the wheel, published minimum standards, and serious testing of them in order to get the license, followed by periodic retesting, retesting/retraining after every accident or moving violation, and periodic physicals to make sure you are capable of managing the automobile.
Ah, well… I can dream…
Oh, by the way - the pilot pays for the retraining and retesting in aviation, and has to provide the airplane for the tests. Why can’t this apply to drivers of cars?
Yes.
Well, maybe it would improve your parallel parking…?
A “refresher” course might well make you think a little more consciously about your usual driving habits. It might incorporate dealing with simulated emergencies (I would hope you don’t often encounter real emergencies!). It might cover changes in laws since your last refresher course. Over the course of a day or a half a day touching on all of these may help correct bad or sloppy habits, mentally review how to deal with emergencies, and keep you up to date on the rules of the road. You don’t think there would be some benefit to that?
They’re more commonly called “defensive driving” or “advanced driving” and yes, it can get you a break on your car insurance if you’re willing to fill out a little paperwork to go with them.
Look, in the US compared with most other countries, driving is an absolute requirement for most people to hold a job and perform normal living functions, because they way we live does not allow most people access to public transportation, so they cannot work, shop, or run any errands, etc. without a car. So the society is much more willing to tolerate bad driving before they revoke the “priviledge” of driving than in Europe.
Effectively we are prepared to tolerate more deaths per capita (and even more deaths per mile) in order to avoid criminalizing a large part of the population. Because, believe me, if you revoked the licenses of 10% of American drivers, most of those would drive anyway. Then your only option would be to inflict some kind of criminal penalty.
I think that’s more an indication of how crap our “driver’s ed” courses are than anything else.
Bravo. Then the problem isn’t you, it’s all those idiots who did take driver’s ed and still screw up. Or read the manual and still screw up. Or just never read the manual.
Which is a good point - but I don’t think immediate retesting should be allowed, either. Perhaps we should first issue restricted licenses then allow upgrades not based on age but on demonstrated competence.
Let me give the aviation example - a minimum of every two years an active pilot must have a “flight review” (some types of pilot more often, but let’s not complicate things right now). That’s one hour of reviewing stuff like regulations and procedures, either in a formal classroom or one-on-one with a certified instructor. Then one hour of flight time where competency must be demonstrated in accordance with published standards. That two hours, every two years. If you sail through it, great, that’s all you’re obligated for. If you can’t do it, THEN you pay for refresher training.
The pilot pays the instructor for his/her time at an hourly rate. The pilot provides the vehicles (airplane). Yes, there’s also usually a fee - last time I paid it was $100, don’t know what they are now.
Now, cars aren’t quite the same thing as airplanes, so… perhaps 1/2 hour class/face time and then completing a list of maneuvers to a specific standard. Driver provides car, pays for the tester’s time, possibly a fee which I assume will be less than what we pay as pilots, perhaps $20 or $25 (like driver’s renewals now). Let’s say every 5 years. Or every 10. Is that so unreasonable? Particularly since doing well at the review avoids having to spend more money.
Do you think they’d pay attention if you said “If you don’t pass this 90 minutes you will have to take a class, but if you do pass it then see you next decade.”?
Again - if you’re fantastic driver, yeah, it’s a hassle - but think of all the idiots who CAN’T do that and are off the road until they improve, leaving more room for you to drive.
Telling you? Check again, bucko, because I asked some pertinent questions.
Instead of giving me a nonsense answer to pertinent questions maybe you could simply answer them. I won’t even ask if you’re a driving instructor or a traffic cop.
Odesio
It might benefit me a little. I’m just not convinced that the benefits outweigh the trouble and expense of going through a refresher course. Some of this sounds a little more advanced than my regular driver’s ed course from the mid 90s. Simulated emergencies? Seriously, who did those?
Thank you for actually answer my questions though. I apprecaite it.
Odesio