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FAILING THE TEST

Despite the much-hyped revamping of the Theory Test two years ago, UK accident rates are on the rise again. In the first of two articles, Stephen Picton takes a personal look at the driving test and finds it sadly lacking. This month, he focuses on the Hazard Perception Test

Precious Moments

Recently I came within approximately ten seconds of dying in a road traffic accident. I use the term "accident" rather than the more politically correct (in road safety terms) "crash" because, had it actually happened to me, it wouldn't have been my fault. Or would it? There are two schools of thought on this. After all, what does ten seconds represent in terms of a slice of my life? One more rinse of the mouth after brushing my teeth? Stumbling whilst trying to put my left leg in my trousers? Fumbling with the key whilst trying to lock the front door? I can't remember which of these mundane activities was responsible for inadvertently adding ten seconds onto my morning schedule and, in a sense, it doesn't matter; but the net result of that minuscule time saving was that I arrived at a crucial point in space and time, ten seconds later than I might otherwise have done and consequently avoided sustaining serious injury and, quite probably, death.

So, had I not rinsed my teeth one more time - or whatever - and died in a head to head collision with an on-coming vehicle with whom I shared a combined velocity almost certainly in excess of 100 miles per hour, would it have been my fault? The Government's Driving Standards Agency (DSA), the people who promote "Safe driving for life" say it would have been. I think that's at best a harsh judgement, and at worst a downright reckless one. What do you think?

But of course you, very wisely, are unlikely to make a judgement until you know the facts of the case. The DSA is apparently happy to do so but leave that alone for the moment.
Here then are the facts.

The Dangerous Game


I was driving along a fast straight section of the A14 in Suffolk, travelling towards Norwich with a single passenger. The road was busy in both directions, and on either side there was a high grass embankment. My memory of the event is rather hazy now, but I think I caught a flash, several vehicles in front, of a car on the opposite carriageway, suddenly dart across to our side of the road as if attempting a foolhardy overtaking manoeuvre, and thereby forcing the on-coming car to take extreme evasive action by braking and steering violently into the centre of the road.

The cars in front of us slowed to a crawl. Some pulled over and stopped. After a minute or two of confusion the majority of the queue pulled around the stationary vehicles and we were able to see the results of the incident. The car that I had seen apparently attempting a reckless overtaking manoeuvre was resting on the embankment at a crazy angle. In it, being comforted by - as it later turned out - the person she had nearly killed, was a middle-aged woman in a clearly very distressed state.

We pulled over in an effort to see if we could be of assistance and a gentleman who had been driving in the car immediately behind the distressed lady's explained what had happened.

It seems the woman had not been attempting a reckless overtaking manoeuvre as I had assumed. She had, according to the gentleman, suffered from a sudden blackout or fit of some kind and lost control of her vehicle, which had then slewed violently to the right straight across the path of on-coming traffic and onto the steep embankment opposite. In doing so she had missed the car - driven by the gentleman who was even now offering comfort to her - by what must have been a matter of micro-seconds. I was sure that this miracle was only accomplished by some staggeringly quick reactions on the part of that driver but later learned he had spotted the lady driving erratically seconds before and slowed down in readiness, thereby displaying impressive proactive driving skills (hold that thought; we'll return to it later.)

Nonetheless, had that gentleman arrived at the spot a second earlier, or had the woman suffered her blackout a second later, I am in no doubt that, regardless of best avoidance techniques, either or both of them would be dead and several other motorists would even now be in intensive care.

The Blame Game


Had I not stumbled whilst putting on my trousers I might have been there instead. But would it have been my fault? Could I have called it an "accident" - a term bound to elicit howls of righteous indignation from road safety groups - or would it in fact have been just another of the thousands of eminently avoidable fatal "crashes" that, despite those same road safety campaigners' best endeavours, happen year on year?

Or was it the fault of the road planners who left steep embankments and no hope of escape from such such a fast road? Or what about the people who decreed that 60 miles per hour was a safe speed on such a dangerous stretch? Or what about the manufacturers who design cars capable of travelling at high speed; their drivers oblivious to the second-by-second danger sitting in beautifully cosseted interiors? Or perhaps it was the woman's fault for not having the prescience to have her health checked, thereby leaving her ignorant to her body's potential for disaster?
It's a long list of suspects, but which was the real culprit?

The DSA clearly thinks it would have been my fault; or, indeed, that it would have been your fault if you had been in the car in front of me that day, probably arriving just nine and half seconds earlier. Go to its website and you will find a handy pop-up "driving hints" window sagely informing you that "Your safety lies in your own hands." That's seems pretty clear cut doesn't it? Me driving, my fault; you driving, your fault.

Except of course that this is PATENTLY NOT TRUE. I am not given to spontaneous abuse of capital letters in my writing but I feel so strongly about this issue that those readers sensitive to such things should be warned I might even be driven to repeat the felony in the next sentence. For it seems pretty clear to me that all too frequently your safety in a car lies not in your own hands but in the hands of EVERY OTHER LUNATIC ON THE ROAD.

The Trust Game
An accident waiting to happen? The driving test is seen as a minor obstacle in the pursuit of freedom for most youngsters Don't get me wrong. I am a passionate advocate of defensive driving and I believe we could all go a lot further in taking proper responsibility for our own safety on the road, but to pretend that this is going to fully protect us going about the most dangerous everyday pursuit in existence is utter folly.

I don't care how risky your occupation is, or how dangerous the extreme sports you enjoy in your spare time, there is almost certainly nothing you do that puts you so completely at on-going fatal risk from the mistakes or bare-faced stupidity of other people on a daily basis as driving down a busy road.

Flowers for a young lad that had only just passed his test		 Ever had that slightly queasy feeling walking past the increasingly common sight of an armed policeman with a sub-machine gun dangling at his side? Just suppose he's mentally unbalanced and received the divorce papers from his wife that morning and decided it would be a good moment to "freak out". Ever worried about being the victim of a random terrorist attrocity like the ones we seem to see daily on the morning news? Ever felt the plane lurch - and your stomach with it - in some unexpected turbulence as it comes in to land or worried about DVT?

Then why, in Heaven's name, do you not quake in your boots every day at the prospect of getting into your car, unsafe in the statistically incontrovertible evidence that this four-wheeled fool's paradise is many hundreds of thousands of times more likely to be the instrument of your death than any of the eminently more frightening and media-friendly methods mentioned above? Why are you not gripped with fear every time you drive down a busy road faced with the indisputable truth that any one of the drivers coming the other way could, with a single flick of a wrist, kill you just as certainly as if they were an Al Quaeda suicide bomber with some plastic explosives strapped around their waist or a drug-crazed gangster toting an AK47.

 Answer: because we trust them, these perfect strangers continually driving towards us in their weapons of mass destruction. We have learned to trust them for the sake of a convenience which modern society has conditioned us into thinking we cannot do without. We have learned to trust them because if we did not we would all be gibbering paranoid wrecks in our cars. We trust them because we know that they have to trust us for the same reasons. It is a mutual, shared trust.

Blind Faith

 Hazard perception is a practical skill, the testing of which
should take place behind the wheel of a car next to a
skilled professional

That is why driving is not a right - as some would seem to think - but a privilege and a collective responsibility. Each of us shares a responsibility to see to it that another road user's trust in our driving ability is not misplaced. Our "right" in this situation is not the right to drive, but rather the right to expect that every other driver on the road drives to the highest possible standard in the mutual interests of our own safety. After all, we depend on them for our own survival. As in all situations of mutual trust there has to be some element of assurance - some concrete declaration of acceptance to "play by the rules" - the absence of which would render trust as blind faith.

So what is this concrete declaration - this binding commitment of joint responsibility - so potent it allows us to blithely put our trust in an activity statistically more dangerous than free-fall sky-diving?

It's a 40-minute practical exercise involving the fallible judgement of a single observer, which until two years ago had barely changed in format for virtually half a century; it's an exercise that, despite those recent cosmetic improvements, has manifestly failed to reduce the horrific casualty figures on our roads despite massive increases in car safety, yet one which has been subject to the bare minimum of scrutiny and revision by successive governments despite the repeated efforts of safety campaigners; it's an exercise so anachronistic it still involves people performing manoeuvres they may never have to repeat in their life, yet which chooses to ignore some of the most hazardous types of driving on modern roads, all of which are usually undertaken by novice drivers within days of passing the test; it's an exercise administered with such spectacular ineptitude that its providers have recently had to remove their own "award" for excellence - an extraordinary event marked with total indifference by most of the millions who use our roads daily.

It's called the driving test and I believe its present state is nothing short of a national scandal.

So let's take a closer look at it, this single obstacle to all potential on-coming maniacs in which we must blindly put our faith.

The Driving Test Evolves
 All too frequently your safety in a car lies not in your own
hands but in the hands of every other lunatic on the road		 In November 2002, the driving test underwent possibly the most radical change in its history with the revamping of the Theory Test. Consisting of two separate parts - questions on the Highway Code and, more radically, a Hazard Perception Test - the new combined Theory Test was designed specifically to ensure that candidates have a sufficient understanding of the rules of the road before being able to take the practical part of the test. The first part - a set of multiple choice questions (MCQ) testing the candidate's knowledge of the Highway Code - is, in essence, an extended version of the questions previously asked by the examiner at the end of the practical test.
So far so good. Putting the questions on a computer, five years ago, seemed the logical way of extending the process, standardising the test, and ensuring that a greater level of understanding of the Highway Code was required from candidates. There have been criticisms expressed about the multiple choice nature of the test - and of the fact that all the possible questions are available to candidates in advance - but the sheer number and variety of these questions seems to outweigh these criticisms, as does the significantly low pass rate (currently around 58%, and mainly due to failing the MCQ rather than the HPT element). On the face of it, the multiple-choice element of the Theory Test seems an effective way of moving with the times.

Not so the Hazard Perception Test, a computer-based driving simulation which involves the candidate sitting in front of a computer screen, watching a driver's-eye video clip of various driving situations and clicking a mouse button every time a hazard appears.

The Hazard Deception Test

 Far from improving the poor anticipation skills of novice drivers,
it compounds them in favour of inadequate reflex response
Having received literally hundreds of letters from driving instructors complaining bitterly about the Hazard Perception Test (many, before they realised they would have to take it themselves), I was recently asked to debate the merits of the test on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours programme with Paul Butler from the DSA. Unfortunately, as is the way with these things, there was nowhere near enough time to discuss the issue fully, but there was time for Mr Butler to express his "disappointment" that the Driving Instructors Association was anti the test as, he said, in consultation it had "always been in favour of hazard perception." He also steadfastly refused to accept that the millions of pounds and "many years of research" spent had resulted in the botch job that many have seen fit to call the test.

Just for the record Mr Butler, the Driving Instructors Association was indeed in favour of hazard perception testing; just not the deeply inadequate method for testing it that the DSA has, finally, come up with.

So, without the constraints of valuable Radio airtime, what precisely is so wrong with the Hazard Perception Test?

The Awful Truth
 Driving is not a right but a collective responsibility.
Our 'right' is to expect every other driver to be tested
to the highest possible standard

According to the DSA, the hazard perception test was introduced in response to extensive research into the failings of younger drivers, in particular their ability to perceive and respond to increasingly hazardous conditions on our roads. On the Agency's website is the following:

"New drivers take much longer to recognise hazardous situations than more experienced drivers, and many driving test candidates have poor scanning and anticipation skills. These skills are vital for safe driving."

Few drivers would disagree with this statement. Yet the hazard perception test fails completely to address the precise issues of "poor scanning and anticipation" central to the DSA's mantra. It fails for four reasons:

1 The image quality of the test is resoundingly poor, making middle-to-long distance scanning impossible and forcing candidates to adopt a tunnel vision approach of leaning in to the screen and screwing up their eyes that is wholly counter-productive to any concept of scanning. The following example is typical of the complaints made by candidates: In one of the original test clips provided by the DSA, a car about to overtake in the distance cannot be seen indicating until far too late. Despite the DSA's insistence that the video quality has improved, experts agree it is a hardware-based problem (i.e. the resolution of the computer screen) and the hardware has remained the same since the test's introduction.

2 The width of the computer monitors used for the test represents approximately just one third of a driver's actual field of view, with no simulation of mirrors or peripheral view. Research has shown that most car accidents involving pedestrians occur due to the driver's failure to perceive hazards peripherally; a child emerging from between parked cars for instance. Again, this encourages a form of tunnel vision which is dangerous to adopt in a real driving situation and which absolutely negates any concept of "scanning".

3 Because the only scoreable hazards are "developing" or moving hazards, the candidate is encouraged to develop a REACTIVE approach to driving rather than the PROACTIVE one favoured by all driver trainer professionals. This is by far the most serious charge levelled against the Hazard Perception Test. Far from improving the "poor anticipation" skills of novice drivers, it compounds them by actively promoting the suppression of forward planning in favour of inadequate reflex response. A threatening "click too many times and you'll score zero for cheating" policy means that successful candidates will train themselves to ignore non-developing but nonetheless very real hazards. (Think back to the lady driving erratically in her car on the A14.) The DSA's blithe assertion that "you can click on non-developing hazards as well" cuts little ice with a generation of computer literate youngsters raised on Playstations and X-Boxes. Teach them the rules of the game for scoring points and they will try and score points; they will not be interested in the hazards which score zero points, even if these happen to be the ones that could turn into a dead pedestrian or motorist. Most 17-year-olds do not fear the hazard perception test because they know it is simply a game and most of them are good at games. Adults and experienced drivers, however, are often fearful of the test because they treat it as the real life simulation it so patently isn't. So confused were initial responses to the test - particularly with regard to what constituted a hazard - that the DSA was even forced to alter its definition of the word thereby turning a crucial aspect of road safety into a semantic exercise. Hazards are not always things that are happening but things that might happen. Even the DSA's own What if? Safety video promotes this life-saving concept of PROACTIVE driving. Yet the Hazard Perception Test encourages the worst sort of REACTIVE driving among novices.

4 It's not real. This might sound like a trite criticism but in a way it's the most fundamental of the lot. The mere inclusion of hazard perception in the Theory section of a driving test should start alarm bells ringing. Hazards are not theoretical. On-coming cars travelling at 60 mph whose driver has just blacked out are not theoretical. A child running into the middle of the road and ending up on your windscreen like a broken ragdoll is not theoretical. Hazards are practical; and hazard perception is a practical skill, the training and testing of which should take place in one place and one place only: behind the wheel of a car next to a skilled professional. In an age when cars are responsible for three and a half thousand deaths in the UK every year and a significant proportion of those deaths - according to the Government's own research - are caused by lack of hazard perception skills from young drivers who drive like they're playing the latest X-Box game, don't you find it bitterly ironic that the DSA should try to combat these attitudes by getting them to play a badly-produced video game?

Coming soon Stephen Picton considers the practical driving test.
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