At long last our parliamentarians are doing something about the carnage on our roads – but as they so often do – they are making a hash of it.
It is a fact that young drivers are the major cause of the problem so the obvious knee-jerk reaction is to raise the age at which you can get a driver’s licence.
That approach is simplistic – disadvantages many – particularly those in rural areas – and anyway entirely misses the point.
The problem is generally not caused by 15 year olds, so increasing the age to 16 will achieve nothing.
The problem is caused by inexperienced drivers driving extremely powerful cars. If we raise the driving age to 16 it will simply mean that the drivers in the real problem area 17 – 25 will have had one years less experience.
The whole process of getting a drivers licence is wrong. We send our kids off to a driving school where they putter around in little cars at 30-40k’s then say they are good enough to hold a drivers licence. We then put them in a car that is capable of doing 200k’s and tell them to go to it on the open road. These kids have no experience at high speed driving and little or no experience at car control.
To me the answer is obvious. Include a high speed driving/car control component in the process required to gain a drivers licence. It would be easy to set up at tracks such as Taupo or Manfield.
Everyone who wants to gain a licence should be given expert tuition on high speed car control and then observed whilst they do a few laps of the circuit in a prescribed time.
We will never stop young people speeding – but we can keep them and other road users alive by improving everybody’s driving skill level.
Think about it. It is an absolute nonsense the way we currently test for drivers licences. It is a process that is set in the days when cars were slow and heavy. Today’s cars are light and extremely powerful and we need to give prospective drivers a set of skills that can cope with such powerful recycled beer cans.
Raising the age from 15 to 16 will achieve nothing. You and I all know 15 year olds who are far more mature than some of the politicians who are making a hash of this new legislation.
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