Ireland's 'provisional' drivers in shock

By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2007-11-03

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By most standards, Ireland's system for new drivers has been a bit peculiar. New drivers entering the system got a provisional license, which allowed them to drive with an accompanying licensed driver. If they took a road test and failed it, they could apply for, and get, a second provisional license, and on this, they could drive unaccompanied!

More interesting yet, a provisional driver didn't need to actually take a test and fail it to get a new provisional. A driver who missed a scheduled test could even use the appointment letter to renew. Apparently, many drivers repeated this process a number of times.

Recently, the Irish public were shocked to when it was revealed that as many as 29,000 drivers were on the roads with their 3rd or 4th provisional license, presumably having failed several tests.

Naturally, after a decade or two of this, 'provisional' driving became embedded in lifestyles. In a thriving economy, young drivers matured, got jobs, commuted, raised families, bought houses in the 'burbs (or beyond), and built auto-mobility into their lives based on provisional driver licenses.

Suddenly, all that was to change as of Monday, Oct 29, 2007. Now drivers on a second, or succeeding, provisional license would need a fully licensed driver beside them. Some 420,000 drivers were potentially affected. About 20% of all Irish drivers are driving on provisional licenses, according to Conor Faughnan of AA Roadwatch.

The shock waves caused an outcry, with the specter of thousands thrown out of work, businesses wrecked, families thrown into hardship.

The government was forced to back off on implementation, with a new deadline set for June 30th, 2008. Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey promised to hire new personnel to get rid of the huge backlog of test appointments.

Gay Byrne, chairman of Ireland's Road Safety Authority, parried accusations that there wasn’t enough warning and that the change in rules had been ill thought out and placed an unreasonable burden on police to "exercise discretion."

Byrne, a former popular late-night TV talkshow host, and a major proponent of the new rules, argued that Irish police (Gardai) had been given lots of warning. However, the rules put the Gardai in an awkward position and, in essence, placed on their shoulders the burden of negotiating the licensing system through the havoc that would ensue if the new rules were strictly enforced, and if drivers actually obeyed them.

Minister Dempsey was forced to clarify that the new rules would not be automatically enforced and that gardai would use "discretion and common sense, as opposed to automatic prosecution" while provisional drivers struggled to deal with their new status and the road test backlog.

Irish driving standards

Roads in Ireland are often spectacular, and also very often challenging to drive on. Speeds tend to be high (although there's recently been a clampdown), and driving is not as sedate as in North America.

Frommer's 2007 travel guide for Ireland rates it as the "second most-dangerous-country in Europe in which to drive." Travel broadcaster Rick Steves offers this advice:

"Every year I get a few cards from traveling readers advising me that, for them, trying to drive in Ireland was a nerve-racking and regrettable mistake. To get a little slack on the roads, drop by a gas station or auto shop and buy a red "L" (new driver with license) sign to put in your window."

Irish drivers tend to complain bitterly about their fellow road users, not that that's any different from drivers anywhere else on the planet. However, there is an extraordinary case for complaint in Ireland. Testing has never been taken that seriously, and a high percentage of Irish drivers have probably never taken or passed a road test.

The current provisional driving system is just a part of that. Many older drivers were not tested because there was no test when they got their first license. Then, back in the 1980s, the government dealt with a serious backlog in road testing by granting thousands of provisional drivers a full license because they had been waiting a long time. And on top of that there's the laxity about the provisional license which resulted in the recently broadcast figures of 420,000.

In other words, it's easy to place blame for bad driving on Irish roads on drivers who have never have passed a test.

However, is that view really valid? If all those lax provisional drivers do get tested by June 30, '08 will it make a big change in Irelands traffic and reduce casualties significantly?

Probably not. There is little, if any evidence that passing driving tests makes drivers safer.

Will testing drivers help?

"Road tests are unreliable," says Larry Lonero, author of Changing Road User Behavior: What works, what doesn’t. A lot can depend on the examiner, and even on the particular day. He cites one study of examiners which showed that, in one testing location in Ontario, results from individual examiners varied from 20% pass rate to 20% fail rate. It's hard to argue that some examiners got so many more bad candidates than others.

There isn't any research that unequivocally proves that drivers who pass tests are safer, Lonero says. However, there has been a study that shows longer tests are more reliable in producing consistent results amongst examiners.

Tougher tests might reduce crash rates by taking drivers off the roads, much the same way graduated licensing systems do, Lonero adds

There seems to be a general consensus now that no one measure will significantly change the risk-taking behavior of drivers. This will have only result from a range of measures orchestrated by both government and non-government agencies.

Basically, what's needed is a change in road culture, a cultural paradigm shift, Lonero argues. He made that case in a recent paper entitled Finding the next cultural paradigm for road safety, which he produced for the Washington-based AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Even well-founded efforts won't achieve much, Lonero wrote, if they are contrary to the dominant paradigm. In other words, speeding, aggressive behavior, risk taking, have to become culturally unacceptable to the vast majority of road users before behavior will change significantly.

That means more testing, more enforcement, better training, and sustained media campaigns.

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