Originally Posted by
kmh001
HERE'S A LONG WINDED WAY OF SAYING THE SAME THING TRICACHE SAID.
It’s a complicated issue. In my view the root cause is the fact that we are a car-based society, and with the exception of certain prescribed disabilities, the voting public believes they are “entitled” to hold a driver’s license.
However we now know that a significant proportion of motor vehicle license holders have mental and personality dispositions that result in poor decision making and/or an inability to reject high-risk behaviour. These dispositions would preclude them from gaining entry to more controlled environments like railways and aviation.
A pre-disposition for poor decision making is something no amount of education can resolve. In fact defensive driving courses can sometimes do more harm than good because some people go away from them feeling like they've miraculously become a competent racing racer.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, governments everywhere have concluded that the risk consequence of allowing unsuitable drivers to continue driving is lower than the political consequences of trying to take them off the road. Instead, they create the illusion of managing road safety with ineffective concepts like setting speed limits and pretending to enforce them.
One of the tragedies in road safety has been that the false notion of speed enforcement has been attributed to improving the road death toll, when really this improvement has come from improved vehicle design. If we were still driving 1970’s technology vehicles the road death toll in this country would be over 10,000 annually instead of around 500 and people might be less eager to accept the speeding myth.
Occasionally some science comes along that gives legislators an opportunity to make good road safety policy, such as the alcohol and fatigue programs.
Years ago legislators had road trauma statistics that showed young males were disproportionately represented. But there was no science available at the time to explain why. Unfortunately for young blokes the case against them has got a whole lot stronger since brain scientists proved that the part of the brain that processes risk does not fully develop in males until around age 25.
There are now compelling scientific reasons to place restrictions on young drivers because for a large proportion of them, education is not going to help. Like the alcohol and fatigue programs, this is not going to go away.
I don’t ever see the day where governments reduce this risk by following the aviation and railway industries by increasing the entry age and conducting psychometric testing on license applicants, because it would contradict the “entitled to drive” mentality of the majority. It’s a shame really because I think this could be the next major improvement in road safety.