EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  The RAC Foundation believes urgent action is needed to address the rising number of collisions involving young people on UK and International roads. Driver attitude and inexperience are the key factors relating to collisions amongst this group and the Foundation strongly believes that education rather than legislation is the way forwards. Log books, advisory guidelines, some compulsory professional tuition and additional driver training would be most welcome.

  The Foundation does not feel graduated vehicle licensing is appropriate, but would instead welcome education, training and advice to new drivers, to make them aware of the dangers faced. Targeting messages using social media, as in the Make Road Safe campaign is a new approach and more publicity and educational work of this type would be beneficial. The Foundation does not recommend a change to the driving age, due to the equity and mobility issues it presents to young people, the majority of whom are sensible and safe drivers. There is some potential in the differential treatment of offenders, in the areas of drink driving, and collisions where multiple passengers are involved, but overall this area would benefit from remaining unchanged.

1.  Background to the RAC Foundation for Motoring

  1.1  The RAC Foundation for Motoring is an independent charity established to promote the environmental, economic, mobility and safety issues relating to use of motor vehicles. Our vision is to advocate innovative transport solutions for safer roads, safer drivers, greener cars, improved mobility and a fair deal for motorists.

  1.2  The RAC Foundation was originally set up in 1991 fundamentally as a research arm of RAC. Following the de-merger and sale of RAC in 1999, the Foundation took on a new and wider role to include researching and promoting issues of safety, mobility, economics and the environment.

2.  The nature of the novice driver problem

  2.1  The RAC Foundation agrees that novice drivers are more at risk in being involved in collisions and believes that this is a consequence of inexperience and attitudes towards driving rather than age per se. Inexperience explains over one third of all accidents involving younger drivers (DfT, Stats 19 IN: ABI, 2006). Everyday, four people are killed or seriously injured in accidents involving young drivers and eight out of ten accidental deaths involving 15-19 year old men occur on the road (DfT stats IN: ABI, 2006).

  2.2  Attitudes towards driving are key in relation to collision rates and it is addressing these attitudes through education and enforcement, which is important for future reductions.

"Many 17-20 year-olds associate driving with personal status, and are more inclined than older people to drive for pleasure or thrills. Sometimes even when young drivers have a good knowledge of how to drive safely, they do not do so. This can be seen in their willingness to break both formal and informal rules of the road. Young drivers, and particularly men, commit the highest number of Highway Code violations (Stradling et al, 2001). Poor attitudes lead to anti-social driving behaviour, such as competitive driving and driving irresponsibly as a result of peer pressure."

(Source: ABI Young Drivers: Reducing Death on the Roads, Sept, 2006)

3.  Driver education and testing

  3.1  The Foundation supports the use of existing practical and theory tests to encourage safe driving skills and behavior, but is not in a position to provide advice on the current effectiveness of existing training.

  3.2  The Foundation does however believe that changes could be made to driver education and testing to help make novice drivers safer. The Foundation strongly believes that education rather than legislation is the way to improve current collision rates.

  3.3  The Foundation proposes that no minimum training period is set, but competence based targets are set and recorded within a pre-test logbook. Guidelines for the number of hours and miles driven can be provided, but these should not be prescriptive, as such targets are output rather than outcome based, which does not take into account individual capabilities. Requiring novice drivers to have compulsory professional tuition has its benefits, but the Foundation questions whether this additional financial burden, particularly for those on low incomes, will discourage some from learning to drive, or encourage more to drive unlicensed.

  3.4  The RAC Foundation supports additional driver training such as pass-plus schemes and suggests that providing this training before the test might be beneficial. The uptake of post-driver training is low, and this is partially attributable to young driver attitudes about their skills and capabilities. If training for motorway driving and night driving were seen as the last modules to be taken before the test, it is possible that reaching this point in driver training could give young drivers additional "kudos" amongst their peers, which is not currently achieved under existing advanced training.

4.  Graduating licensing

  4.1  The RAC Foundation supports graduated licensing in principal, but advises that this issue is best dealt with through providing recommendations to new drivers, rather than passing legislation on issues, which would be near impossible to enforce.

  4.2  The Foundation is opposed to the idea that lower speed limits and/or a lower blood alcohol limit should be applied to novice drivers. Lower speed limits would not be enforceable and are unlikely to be respected by new drivers. If they were implemented and followed, lower speeds by new drivers may aggravate other road users, which would lead to road rage and tailgating. With regard to alcohol limits the message to all drivers should be "Don't drink and drive" and therefore setting a different blood alcohol level for young drivers would send a confusing message.

  4.3  Research has proved that risks increase for young and novice drivers when traveling at night and with passengers, particularly because drivers are more likely to be under the influence of drink and drugs at night. 50% of accidents involving young male drivers that result in death or serious injury occur at night, compared with 35% for older drivers. The Foundation therefore would support a concerted education campaign to raise awareness amongst young/novice drivers and their families of the dangers involved in driving under these circumstances.

  4.4  The RAC Foundation, in conjunction with the FIA Foundation, is already working on this area through the "Make Roads Safe" campaign, which focuses on improving global road safety. The RAC Foundation is leading the work in the UK context, one aspect of which focuses on using viral marketing campaigns and relevant spokespeople to encourage young people to consider road safety. Rock bands alongside people such as seven times world champion Michael Schumacher and Desmond Tutu have helped raise the profile of road safety issues.

  4.5  Recently, Top Indie Band, Dirty Pretty Things, became involved in the campaign after three teenage girls were killed in a car crash after one of their gigs in Suffolk in July 2006. Claire Stoddart, 18, Jennifer Stoddart, 15, and Carla Took, 18, all from Lowestoft, Suffolk, were killed on 1 July 2006 when their Vauxhall Astra was involved in a car crash. They had been returning home from a concert in Ipswich at which Dirty Pretty Things had performed.

  4.6  In response to this tragedy a special Make Roads Safe gig was held in September to raise awareness, and the bands subsequent UK tour has promoted the Make Roads Safe message. This was followed by "Campaign on Campus" during UK Road Safety Week (November, 2006), which targeted students at universities across the UK in an effort to promote political action on global road deaths and reduce young driver crashes in the UK. A further major gig is planned during the First UN Global Road Safety week in April 2007.

  4.7  An online game "Roadie Runner", which has been played more than 100,000 times, was launched in October 2006, and has been targeted at youth sites to encourage road safety messages in a fun, interactive and engaging way. New Musical Express, You Tube, The Dirty Pretty Things Website and other chat rooms and youth sites has been key to getting the Make Roads Safe message out to the right audience. The Foundation therefore encourages an educational approach to be taken with new drivers as opposed to graduated license restrictions.

5.  Changes to the driving age

  5.1  The Foundation does not believe that there will be any additional benefit in changing the minimum age at which a provisional or full licence may be obtained. If casualty reduction improvements were to be seen once introduced, the Foundation expects that these benefits would be short lived, simply deferring casualties to a later year.

  5.2  There is no doubt that there is a significantly higher casualty rating for young people aged 17-20 (See: Figure 1 below), but changing the driving age by one, two or three years is unlikely to have the desired effect, as the attitudes of a 17, 18 and 19 year old are very similar. Evidence suggests that no real casualty saving would be found unless the age were raised to 21 (See: Figure 1 below), when attitudes change considerably and this would have significant impacts on the freedoms and liberties of young people. It must be remembered that there are many sensible and responsible young drivers, and raising the age for learning, will have severe impacts on their accessibility, mobility and quality of life.

6.  Different treatment of offenders

  6.1  The current approach to allowing new drivers to have up to six penalty points on their license within the first two years of driving before disqualification is commendable, but the Foundation questions to what extent this approach can be expanded.

  6.2  To discourage drink driving amongst novice drivers it might be possible to apply instant disqualification and graduated penalties could be made for collisions which involve more than a certain number of passengers, but beyond this type of approach it is difficult to see how further differential treatment could be used. The points and fines signals already exist to discourage illegal road behaviour, and therefore effort should instead be focused on raising awareness and providing improved education.

18 December 2006