Over the last few years we have continued to see that vehicle volumes on our roads have stopped growing, in fact in most cases they have even dropped, especially when looked at on a per capita level. Of the traffic volumes that the NZTA release monthly, the only one close to the centre of Auckland is the Harbour bridge. Here is what the volumes have been doing and as you can see that things aren’t that different from a few years ago and actually down quite a bit on 2007 numbers.
But an article on the Herald caught my eye yesterday and made me think about what might happen in the future.
Learner-drivers are still failing driving tests in droves, six months after tough new standards were introduced.
The fail marks include one person aged over 75 and a young Taupo man who has made seven unsuccessful attempts.
Sixty-two per cent of drivers failed the test in March, the month after it was rolled out in an attempt to cut the number of young people dying in road crashes.
New Zealand Transport Agency figures show 54 per cent failed the test last month, proof people were realising they needed at least 120 hours of supervised practice before the test, agency boss Geoff Dangerfield said.
First I think it is good that driving tests are harder as improving driving skills and reducing the number of people in road crashes is really important. Â What got me thinking though was the impact these tougher driving tests would have on travel in the future. If tests remain tough (or even get tougher still) it is quite likely that a lot of young people will simply choose not to learn to how to drive. Over the long term, say 30 years, that will really have an impact on the number of vehicles on the road but also demand for other transport options. Further what would it do to the projections for traffic growth in the RoNS business cases? Lots of questions but are our policy makers thinking about them?
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Really, should anyone be on the road who can’t pass the new tests? Plenty of drivers have licences from before the three-stage licence was introduced (1987), or got a licence converted from overseas, who’ve NEVER had a real driving test. It’s outrageous there’s no re-test when you renew your licence. At the very least, you should have to re-do the multiple-choice theory test.
There are thousands, probably tens-of-thousands, of people on the roads who got their licences in NZ and couldn’t pass the tests if you sat them down tomorrow.
I’ve previously been a Fire Service driving competition as a marshal. One of my duties was marking the theory section, which was the scratchy multi-choice tests used for class 1 and class 2 licences. Of, from memory, 25 people on the day, well fewer than half would’ve got a learner car licence and only three would’ve got a learner class 2 licence. These were all people who were (many still are) entrusted with driving fire appliances as urgent traffic; that is, lights, sirens, and lots of flexibility around following the rules. One of them didn’t know the speed limit after passing an “Accident” sign!
I’ve called many times for mandatory re-testing with licence renewal, even if it’s just a theory test. The new computer-based testing regime is excellent because it requires that people know the answers, not just which box to scratch.
mandatory re-testing with licence renewal
Yes.
Operating a dangerous (potentially fatal) piece of machinery should require regular certification. In this case testing every ten years is entirely appropriate.
My teenage kids have no interest In driving, and it’s certainly not because of my influence (I’m not silly enough to think they’d do what I suggest) just dont see the point, walk, ride, and PT everywhere they go. Can’t imagine wanting to spend the sort of money a car costs to buy an own on something so boring…. Getting from A to B.
To be fair if I had to buy my first car entirely myself I would never have had a car in my teens. Thinking back I was very grateful for the fact the matched me dollar for dollar on the purchase price (I had to come up with a whopping thousand dollars myself), but I never really realised the true value of the help they gave me with maintenance, insurance and topping up the tank every now and again. Really what teenager has four or five grand a year to operate even the most basic runabout?
I like country touring, but I get damned bored with day to day driving. I find myself wanting to pull out my smartphone behind the wheel, or incessantly changing channels on the radio.
I wonder if the government will also put two and two together and roll back the licensing changes so they don’t imperil their pet RoNS projects?
I doubt they’ll put two and two together with RoNS, but if the pass rates stay this low they may start pressuring NZTA testing officers to go easier, just because it’s a bit embarrassing.
That’s actually really uncalled for, Steve. Whatever National’s faults, they do care about trying to reduce the road toll amongst younger drivers. Making it tougher to get a full licence was a big deal for them, and they even stood up to their core constituency of Federated Farmers and raised the minimum age despite the protests.
Bag their one-eyed focus on massive engineering projects instead of quick-and-effective fixes, sure, but they’re not going to get testing officers (who aren’t, by-the-by, NZTA employees) to start backing off.
National have done admirable work with making the licence tests tougher, and I very much hope you’re right and they don’t back down. But I don’t have as much faith as you that they would stay strong in the face of public pressure, if after a couple of years more than half of the learner drivers are still failing their tests.
It points to a very unbalanced environment where someone in Taupo, not exactly a tiny town, feels that it’s worth spending many hundreds of dollars trying to get their driver’s licence.
Given the fact that the only way to get out of Taupo is either by car or coach, I think that even I would probably try and get a license.
Living in the provinces is pretty tough without driving, a fact goes a long way to understanding why this deeply provincial government can’t grasp the down-sides to a driving only world. ‘Cos that’s where they live, at least in their heads- Gore. They have no idea about what a city is, how it works or what it’s for.
Taupo has both a local bus system and a heap of coaches connecting it all over the North Island (it’s a bit tourist node after all). A little bit of attention to the bus system could make it very easy to live there without a car. It just ain’t that big, and what you couldn’t walk or ride to could be got to on a quite simple bus system.
OK, as someone who got my full car licence a few days after my 15th birthday (and 6 months later got a full motorcycle licence too), I freely acknowledge that I might fail some of the current questions with specific numerical answers. But may I suggest that, while getting those answers correct is a reasonable expectation the first time round, it really has little bearing on day-to-day driving which is largely a matter of driving defensively (especially in Auckland). How many drivers signal properly at roundabouts, for example? Yet most will have been licenced for years.
I think people are failing the practical exam, not the theory. The written exam is pretty trivial (a few days preparation is enough) but the actual driving test is tricky. Not too hard for someone who has driving experience but you can be a very good driver and still fail.
The thing that annoys me is that the examiners force you to drive just under the speed limit. I was driving 50 on a 60k road, the car was unfamiliar, only drove on the road once before and the street was wet. Got told to speed up several times. The whole “drive to the conditions” spiel just seems too vague and encourages people to drive as fast as they can because someone driving behind them might “get nervous”. Honestly, that sounds like an excuse to me, an excuse to justify driving aggressively.
Thanks Tom, I’m pretty sure I would get 100% in the theory if I swotted up for half an hour first. As for the practical test, you would expect that some allowance for the candidate’s relative inexperience to be factored in. Most experienced drivers would quickly recognise whether a novice was competent from their overall performance and attitude, but I suppose examiners have to tick the prescribed boxes.
How many of the people who fail to signal properly know what the law is, though? Plenty of people think you signal right as you enter if you’re going straight ahead, but you don’t. I suspect that a lot of people are so uncertain about roundabouts that they just don’t bother to indicate at all, because you can’t give the wrong signal if you’re not giving any signal.
Some of those strict numerical answers matter, too. Knowing that you’re not allowed to park within six metres of an intersection unless it’s specifically marked matters a huge amount to other road users. A lot of people still don’t know that you’re not allowed to enter an unbroken pedestrian crossing while there are still pedestrians crossing it, too. You can poo-poo the theory of the law, but it’s actually bloody important. Knowing how to handle a vehicle is irrelevant if you don’t know the legal minimums to which your handling must comply.
Matt, you imply that people forget the details of some rules that they knew at the time of gaining their licence, and that’s probably true, but ingrained rules will be applied instinctively (eg parking not less than 6 m from an intersection or 1 m from a vehicle crossing). Subsequent rule changes are well publicised, such as the roundabout rules (BTW you didn’t mention that when going straight through you must still signal left at the appropriate point, and that cyclists are exempt from all roundabout signalling rules), the changes to pedestrian crossing rules, and the recent changes to the give way rules.
But “Knowing how to handle a vehicle is irrelevant…” – sorry, I can’t agree with that! OK, you probably didn’t mean it the way it came across, but all the theory in the world won’t help if you’re outright incompetent at controlling a moving vehicle and/or have no regard for other road users.
PS I could never understand why the unbroken pedestrian crossing rule was changed from the driver’s half to the whole road, especially when the pedestrian is moving away from the line of traffic.
PPS This stopping rule applies to cyclists too, although you wouldn’t know it from observation.
I didn’t think I needed to mention the indicating left to exit thing, given the context, and cyclists are only exempt where they cannot safely comply. I can indicate through the Royal Oak and Panmure roundabouts, so I have little patience for people who try and argue they can’t signal and cycle safely through a roundabout. Indeed, at a roundabout is the very time when a cyclist should be most concerned about their intentions being clear. The exemption is blanket, too, not just at roundabouts.
If you can handle a vehicle safely but don’t know the rules you’re not going to be safe. You can steer and brake and everything, sure, but you’re not going to know things like the 2 and 4-second rules, or parking distances, or giving way to emergency vehicles (and don’t get me started on that bit of road courtesy!). Vehicle handling is a small part of driving courteously, and not driving courteously pisses off other drivers and can result in them doing stupid things out of frustration.
With the figures for traffic over the Harbour Bridge, it would be useful to see a breakdown by time of day in the traffic volumes, if one is available – my hypothesis is some of the peak traffic will be down because of the busway, more of the offpeak traffic will be down because the economy is in the doldrums – as well as the factors you mentioned.
Matt it would be good to see that chart with bus passenger numbers overlaid….?
Ross – I’m sure they will have it by peak and off peak but unfortunately they don’t release that one on their website.
Patrick – The closest thing we get is the screenline survey but without the peak vehicles it is hard to say how many there are http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2012/09/02/aucklands-pt-trends/
The problem with Matt’s original post is the assumption that people wont bother learning to drive if the test is too hard to pass. The reality is that many just wont bother taking the test so instead of fewer cars on our raods there’ll just be fewer licensed drivers. Pretty much a repeat of what’s happened since the introduction of the expensive and lengthy graduated license system, although that system originally broke the cycle of violence by rewarding teens who got professional training with shorter periods to graduate from the learners and restricted licences. That way parental incompetence was revealed to their children rather being reinforced by mum or dad’s amateur driving instructor