Driver training
By: John Kilpatrick
Date: 1994-09-09
This article originally appeared in Vol. 4, Number 3 of Driver/Education, in September, 1994
John Kilpatrick is Operations Director at the Roadcraft-Queensland Driver Training complex at Gympie, Australia. The 58-hectare (143 acre) complex, situated about 100 km (60 miles) north of Brisbane, offers programs ranging from preschool traffic education to pre-license programs, corporate defensive driving courses, and advanced skills training. Facilities include an extensive skid pan, gravel roads, a special 2 km four-wheel-drive training track, a lecture theatre, classrooms, and a display area.
Our training centre was initiated by the Rotary Clubs in Gympie. We had a high road toll in the area so a dedicated committee was formed to establish a road safety driver training complex. Originally, educational programs were conducted for pre-school, primary and high school students. Support was solicited from schools, and teachers would assist on a volunteer basis. In 1983 I was appointed the first full-time staff member and a concerted effort was made to increase the volume of students, while at the same time progressively developing and refining program content.
The traffic safety education program was conducted on a miniaturized road environment which includes features such as intersections, roundabouts, traffic lights and roadway curves. Other programs for high school students, ambulance drivers, motorcyclists, truck drivers, and four-wheel-drive operators were developed with consultation from industry and operators. Currently Roadcraft provides road safety education and driver training for 9,000-10,000 people per year.
A new facility is planned for the Brisbane area (Queensland's capital city) in the near future. Land is available for the project and resource planning is established. We're investigating the concept of a multi-functional, multi-user facility operating on a fee-for-service basis.
My study tour of driver training organizations in North America and Europe had a number of objectives: we want to provide more effective programs for existing clients and to broaden our client base; we want ideas for our new facilities; we want to establish contact with reputable providers of driver training and education; and we want to develop new marketing strategies.
The tour confirmed that there are many people and organizations looking for ways to achieve desirable behavioural outcomes for their students. But it also confirmed the perennial problem of not knowing the effects of instructional input on ongoing safe driver behaviour. I believe that when we discover more effective mechanisms to produce safe drivers it will cause a revolution in the field of road trauma prevention. In the short term, the major effect of my findings on Roadcraft's programs will be to utilise our facilities more efficiently and to apply creative solutions to specific vehicle safety problems.
The Australian driver education movement suffers from negative government attitudes about its effectiveness as a safety measure, and an inability to attract research funds. There's also a lack of networking between practitioners of driver education.
An important part of the study tour was the opportunity to communicate with people and organizations that share common educational philosophies and strategies, and learn from their experiences. The open-minded attitudes demonstrated by practitioners that I met with in North America and Europe have given me the encouragement to try to increase the momentum of driver education in Australia.
Some general observations
The organizations I visited or made contact with in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Austria shared the common feature of having access to ground facilities to instruct in the major component areas of their curricula. Traditional skills such as emergency braking techniques, skid control, and general car control skills took precedence in the USA and to some degree in Canada.
The organizations I had contact with in Canada used a mixture of those traditional skills and attitudinal/behavioural change activities.
Austria and Switzerland centred their programs on skills-based activities with a significant difference: facilities designed to simulate adverse road environment conditions featured prominently. Also, sophisticated use of electronics, low-traction surfaces and skid inducers formed part of the larger organizations' teaching environments and teaching strategies. The most important aspect of the study tour was the opportunity to meet with professional driver education and training practitioners and to establish lines of communication with them.
Comparatively speaking, driver education is a relatively new concept here in Australia and much input is required to find solutions to the problems confronting driver educators. My tour, and the new connections I made, will help greatly in developing the motivation and resources to enhance road safety, not just in our communities here, but also on a national and global basis.
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