Professor Hank Weiss, director of the Injury Prevention Research Unit at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has a startlingly straightforward suggestion for reducing the number of young people killed and injured in cars.
Get them out of cars.
In Brisbane last week for the National Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion, Professor Weiss gave a talk, An Urgent Call for the Demise of Teen Driver Education Programmes, about scrapping teen drivers' education in favour of lessons in safer, healthier and cleaner ways to get around.
As background to Professor Weiss’s comments to follow, here is some perspective from Road Deaths in Australia 1925–2008, a report by the Federal Government’s Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics:
“Nearly 200,000 people were killed in road crashes in Australia in the twentieth century. This is more than double the number of Australians killed (nearly 90 000) in the four major wars in which Australia was involved in the twentieth century: First World War, Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. In addition to the persons killed each year, there are many who are seriously injured. Overall, in 2006 … for every person killed on the roads there were also 20 persons seriously injured, many with debilitating lifelong injuries. Road crashes impose economic costs conservatively estimated to be $18 billion per annum and social costs that are not readily quantifiable but are nonetheless devastating for the individuals, families and communities involved.”
Professor Hank Weiss, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine, at the University of Otago
The basic theme is to begin to look at harm from motor vehicles from a much broader public health viewpoint, not just road safety.
From a public health standpoint, it should not just be about trying to prevent crashes and injuries, but also it should also be about promoting an active lifestyle, reducing car use to avoid pollution, emissions, the greenhouse gas emmissions, the effect on the enviroment.
The idea is to have an integrated approach rather than a narrow silo approach just thinking about how we make people safe in what is actually an activity that carries with it a lot of harm.
Some of the most up to date thinkers in this area are Australian, like [Murray] May and [Paul] Tranter, I’ve quoted their recent paper [Toward a Wholistic Framework for Road Safety, authored also with James Warn].
They call for deep change in road safety instead of the old paradigm of focusing in on trying to make people safe while they drive more. We should think about the more holistic approach, and think about the safety that stems from driving less, and about the multiple benefits across society from driving less.
There’s a real mix out there in terms of driver education. Some of it’s just classroom oriented, focusing in on facts and figures, and maybe some movies. But over and over again the studies that have looked at the effectiveness of that kind of training have not established any. What it ends up doing is just being the gateway to letting people into the driving environment where they then have problems.
Lots has been written in the last few years on the ineffectiveness of what passes for drivers' education these days and there are lots of calls to change it so that people aren’t just getting facts and figures, but are instead able to better evaluate the hazards around them.
There are also calls for more practical training, and there’s some evidence that that sinks in a little bit better, but driving is a very complex activity and it requires a lot of practice. The programmes that graduate [slowly] to licensing and have those initial hours and weeks and months under supervision are probably much more effective than anything you can do in a classroom.
But most young people aren’t interested in drivers' education, or they may not be interested in driving, or they may not know the disadvantages of driving. So I talk about adolescent mobility-health as the alternative paradigm, which is something we could approach every young person with, and not just focus on that minority – especially at the high school age – that are needing or wanting to take up car use.
What cities like Portland [Oregon, in the US] show is that when you have an infrastructure where young people have access to safe cycling and affordable and accessible public transit, they use it; they don’t need to take the car. And the fact is that the injury rate in Portland is much lower than other cities its size, because people don’t have to drive as much.
I’m talking about active transport as a safety measure, and encouraging the people in this audience, who are injury and forensic specialists, to realise that that’s something they can do; it’s something they can support, something they can be involved in.
The more you drive, the more you’re at risk. In the US they measure the effectiveness on the basis of fatalities per mile driven but the problem with that is if more people drive and the rate doesn’t go up accordingly, there can still be more people dying.
It’s not a true public health measure we should be using to evaluate how safe the highways are. If we talk about reducing miles we’re also talking about reducing not only the safety of the person who’s reduced the miles but the safety of the other people whose car they may have hit.
There’s a multiple flow-on effect from reduction in vehicle miles traveled in terms of safety. It’s an important part of the prevention tool kit. And then we take into account the contribution of transportation of transport to climate change, and the increasing cost of travel due to the fuel costs we’re probably going to be traveling less anyways, so we might as well get a start on that.
What do you make of Hank Weiss’s views? Do we mistakenly see youth-driving as a natural right and a respectable, everyday, recreational pursuit, when driving pollutes, replaces exercise, carries hideous risks, and is best done sparingly?
Comments welcome below.
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Comments (12)
Mel Nicholls
(logged in via Facebook)
As a young driver (21, still on green P's) I find that often there is no alternative to driving, and when one exists, it is poorly promoted, too lengthy or unsafe. I used to ride or catch public transport (PT) to school, which was a 20 minute trip either way. Now at uni, riding would take 2 hours (not attractive for an 8am start or 5pm finish), PT takes between 1-1 1/2 hours and driving 1/2 an hour. I now catch public transport, but only after going through a stage of driving and realising how expensive…
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Chris O'Neill
Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)
A large part of the desire to use cars in Australia, especially by young people, has come about because of poor urban planning in the past. How many Australian Universities were built substantial distances from railway lines, for example? These poor decisions were usually influenced by previous poor planning decisions about coverage by railway lines, e.g. in Melbourne most of the railway lines were built to a long way from the city with large distances between them at their extremities. The spaces…
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Matthew Thompson
(Editor, The Conversation)
In Newcastle, NSW, the university was established in 1965 near a railway line, but the station was not built until 1995 and only after plenty of student agitating.
James Walker
(logged in via Facebook)
There's a certain logic to what you are saying. A problem though - I (in my 40s) am only now learning to drive, and finding it quite difficult; and apparently that's normal. As we age our ability to learn quickly degrades, cancelling out what we've gained in maturity.
There'll be an outcry if driving ages are increased, of course, so a couple of ways to get around this:
- make the minimum age to drive (and drink etc) linked to academic achievement. Knowing that they can't get a drivers licence unless…
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Alan Todd
(logged in via Facebook)
Professor Weiss' observations offer a welcome departure from the rather narrow focus that has bedeviled "road safety" thinking, at least in Australia, for several decades. I don't wish to disparage the genuine motives of those who want to see less suffering and death as a result of road trauma. Much of their work is to be applauded. It has however become increasingly clear to me that there is a darker purpose at work, whereby road safety measures reduce the unacceptable collateral damage to just the extent that we can tolerate it as a society, and so continue our wedded attachment to the socially destructive, environmentally ruinous and medically unhealthy activity that is private motorized transport.
I'm not silly enough to believe that the vast interests of oil, vehicle manufacture and associated industries and services are going to disappear without a fight. However reducing road trauma and improving health by driving less seems a good place to start.
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Perhaps a start would be to abolish "Pre-Driver Education" and teach students about traffic rules and conventions from a much younger age.
It seems, from conversations with people newly out of school that almost nothing is taught in most schools about road rules, safe walking or safe cycling. In some cases there is "Pre-Driver" but even that is patchy in its distribution across schools; almost as patchy as coverage of Bike Ed.
John Nightingale
(logged in via Facebook)
Not everyone can spell perfectly in English, the least logical language known to civilisation, William.
But surely it cannot be bad to suggest that the divine right to drive a motor vehicle is actually a social construct that has evolved over the past century, and that the more km driven by a young driver the greater the greater the chance of misadventure costing them and society lots.
The car has a status far from its reality. It feels like an invulnerable casing protecting the occupants from the…
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Matthew Thompson
(Editor, The Conversation)
Dear John, thanks also to you for your perspective, and for your understanding regarding the word glitch.
William Ferguson
Software Developer (logged in via email @xandar.com.au)
While the argument is persuasive, the trend in road fatalities/injuries continues to decline due to advent of red/green P plate provisions, better roads and much better technology in cars. In the future we would expect that to continue, and within 10-15 years start to see some/all driving automated further improving safety.
But until then we could introduce readily available items to improve road usage. Eg required simulator testing on each renewal of your license, and using GPS enabled social network demerit system to allow you to denote another car/driver as being an anti-social/dangerous driver.
Making kids aware of the holistic cost of transport should occur as one small part of social studies in late primary or early high school.
However, what irritated me most about this article was the use of the term 'wholistic' which is a mis-spelling of 'holistic'.
Matthew Thompson
(Editor, The Conversation)
Dear William,
Thank you for your considered response and for pointing out the spelling mistake, which has now been corrected.
John Nightingale
(logged in via Facebook)
Sadly, I suspect you are correct, Alan. It is remarkable that some societies, the northern Europeans - Netherlands, Denmark the outstanding examples, have managed a transformation that has eluded us Anglophones, to mention those we identify with. Their starting points in the later 1960s were indistinguishable in terms of mode share and road behaviour from ours, but they are now unrecognisable, as we know. There is little chance of us following their path, and so we have to engage in 'nanny-state' regulation to achieve road trauma outcomes that are marginally acceptable to voters. Good for GDP perhaps, with all the roadworks and costly trauma repair and maintenance. Not good for human well being.
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I find myself in strong agreement with Alan Todd. My membership was brief of the regional Road Safety Committee I joined, due to the flabergastingly narrow focus of their attention.
Questions of the life-extending benefits of cycling or walking as any kind of balance with risk were utterly prohibited. The sole parameters of concern were deaths and associated injuries on road.
Speaking with the statistician for the Federal Office of Road Safety around the same time elicited a closely parallel answer.
From that kind of mindset, only "nanny-state" responses are possible. Citizen rights have no place, public health - other than road trauma - is irrelevant and freedom of movement was, seemingly, important only in regard of motorised transport.
Abolishing "Road Safety" bodies throughout Australia might be the greatest single contribution we can make to road safety.