New driving test pinpoints safety skills

Press, 22 October 1986, Page 21

New driving test pinpoints safety skills

By

DAVID CLARKSON

At a Waltham stop sign, a young driver undergoing a licence test sets off across the intersection with a squeal of tyres. The traffic officer sitting to his left feels uncomfortable about the fast take-off, and may knit his brow, but the mistake does not mean a mark against the learner on his test sheet. Further along the course that loops through Sydenham and

Waltham, the driver grinds the car’s gears. Through a rear vision mirror he stuck to the windscreen before the 20-minute drive began, the officer scans the learner’s face as the driver searches for the right slot for the gear stick. Grinding the gears will not cost him a bad mark on the score sheet either — unless he takes his eyes off the road to sort out his wayward cogs.

These are two examples the Ministry of Transport has given to show the new approach to driver’s licence testing in the city from November 17. The New Road Test will take over from a licence test that has applied for 15 years, and the Ministry says it will give a fairer judgment of a driver’s safety skills. In both these examples — squealing the tyres and grinding the gears — the learner would have had a mark against him under the old system. But from November, damage to tyres and gearbox will be the driver’s problem. Faults of those kinds will not be marked unless they affect road safety. At the stop sign, the driver squealed the tyres but made a prompt exit from the intersection. There was no increased likelihood of an accident. The grating gears did not affect road safety until the young driver took his eyes off the road to sort the problem out. That meant he could not search for hazards ahead, and the Ministry’s experience is that with a driver’s attention wandering, cars are likely to veer to the left. A month ahead of the starting time, training began for the traffic officers who will conduct the tests, and a meeting of driving instructors was held to tell them of the new standards. The test will be carried out over a set course (see diagram). It takes a week to train the officers how to conduct the practical test, point out the likely hazards along the way, and how

the drivers should respond. By November 17, enough officers will have been trained to conduct the new tests from Transport House in the city, although suburban offices will continue with the old test until December when every Christchurch traffic officer will know the new procedure. The New Road Test has been well tested in Wellington, Hamilton, and Dunedin, and is now spreading to other centres. The Ministry expects the 14 per cent failure rate for driving test applicants will increase slightly under the new test. The main casualties are young male drivers whose aggressive driving styles do not suit the safety oriented test. The accident and complaints officer at the Wellington regional headquarters, Senior Traffic Sergeant Gordon Cooney, says: “Under the old test we were inclined to assess the manipulative skills of a driver. Males in the 15 to 20 year age group are clearly the best for this type of skills. They are also the ones who are having all the injury accidents. They may not have the safety skills that go along with the manipulative skills. Although young males fare worse in the test, the pass rate for young women increases by almost the same amount. Mr Cooney believes that any good driving instructor will have to change his syllabus very little to cope with the demands of the new test. There have been benefits for traffic officers in the new system, too.

In every area where the test has been introduced so far, the officers have acknowledged the benefits of the safety aspects, and their own driving has improved. The test emphasises the need to watch for real and potential hazards. “There are things people realise are there, but we bring them to their attention more clearly,” says Mr Cooney. “Every officer has smartened up his driving. It has made them more aware of the problems that can arise.” The New Road Test was developed over five years by the Traffic Safety Centre at Michi-

gan State University, in the United States. It breaks a driver’s job down into three tasks: search, speed control, and direction control. Each task will be assessed along pre-set sections of the test route. The Ministry is not worried about drivers knowing the test route in advance: Driving conditions are changing all the time, and drivers will not know exactly what parts of the route on which they will be marked. In Christchurch, and other centres, a second route may also be used. The extra route is being set for Christchurch now, but it will not be in use by the time the new tests start. Drivers doing the Christchurch test will face the extra driving problem typical of the city’s reading pattern, according to Christchurch’s Senior Chief Traffic Officer, Ray Hall. "Christchurch is slightly dif-> ferent to some other places in that the intersection exposure rate is high,” he says. “It makes drivers more vulnerable.” The new emphasis on safety does not mean young drivers will need to do a defensive driving course before they take their test. “When we take people for a driving test we are testing them for a minimum level of skill,” Mr Cooney adds. “We don’t expect professional drivers, but we want to make sure young people are safe, when they are starting off.” The old rule still applies: getting a driver’s licence is just another step in the learning process.