Photo by Flickr user sciondriver.
Last week’s news piece about a ban on commercial vehicles longer than 30 feet on U.S. 129 in Blount County, Tennessee, really struck a nerve with readers, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to driver education. As someone with a passion for driving, a bit of racing experience, a few driver’s schools and countless laps at a variety of road courses under his belt, it’s a topic I feel rather strongly about, since driving is perhaps the most under-rated and over-estimated of modern skills.
Blame it on modern cars, which have gotten so forgiving that skills like threshold braking and skid recovery have become lost arts. That’s all well and good until the laws of physics intervene; ABS won’t always stop a car before an oak tree will, and tires won’t always generate enough grip for the electro-nannies to keep a car off a guard rail. While very few drivers have enough training to avoid all potential accidents, there’s a definite correlation between the amount of time spent practicing behind the wheel (under trained supervision) and the number of avoidable crashes on one’s driving record.
Time was that driver’s education was a part of high school curriculum, to the extent that many school districts even had a car (or fleet of cars) to be used in training new drivers. By the time I made it to driver’s ed, it was taught by a disinterested phys-ed teacher and consisted of little more than an overview of basic rules of the road and vehicle operation. The on-road training came courtesy of my father and the local driving school, which was enough to meet the requirements for licensing, but not much more. Today, the situation is even bleaker: many schools offer no training at all, leaving it up to parents, relatives, or driving schools.
Assuming we can agree that there’s a problem in training new drivers, how do we fix it? Do we impose a strict training and licensing regimen like Germany, which produces skilled drivers but a cost unattainable to many in the United States? Do we require participation in one (or more) of the street survival schools now offered to young drivers across the United States? Do we mandate that high schools again teach driver’s education, and if so, how do we fund this? Do we continue to bury our heads in the sand, trusting that automakers will improve automotive safety and hoping that autonomous cars will solve all our problems? What’s your solution?
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