Driver education no silver bullet

By: Drivers.com staff

Date: 1996-10-15

The following interview with Brian O'Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, was conducted in October 1996, shortly after the Washington Summit on Driver Education aimed at establishing a coalition of sponsors to fund new initiatives in driver training and education.

Drivers.com: Is the IIHS against the coalition?
O'Neill: I don't know what the coalition is, apart from an idea amongst participants at the summit. We believe highway safety should be a scientific field, not a field driven by enthusiasm and cheerleading. We know of no reason why a new coalition is needed to promote driver education. So far, there is not one shred of evidence that high school driver education actually reduces crash risk.

Drivers.com: What about the coalition as a means to channel funding to research?
O'Neill: Where will money come from? The DeKalb study is old but it's the best study of driver education effectiveness so far. It cost $6 million to do. The question is, what are they going to evaluate and where will funds come from?

Drivers.com: Is there anything specific that needs to be done?
O'Neill: Yes. Our view is there's lots of new ideas around the world concerning driver education, particularly with respect to graduated licensing. This is happening. I just don't understand the need for a new organization, not at this point in time, particularly when so many of the proponents are, based on their comments, somewhat anti-science...I heard that one of the participants said, "We can't expect these new approaches to hold up to science, and anyway, science is a crock." That received one of the largest rounds of applause at the conference.

Drivers.com: One of the frustrations for driver educators is that we don't have scientific evidence to back us. Perhaps formal driver education could be supported for other reasons. For example, education in general is not backed up by science as far as I know.
O'Neill: But (formal) education in general, as far as I know, does not proclaim that this is the only way you can be educated. We do allow people to teach their children at home under certain controlled circumstances. We allow private schools as an alternative to public schools. We do not say, for example, especially when it comes to vocational learning, that the only way you can become a good cook is to take classes at high school, or become a carpenter by taking shop at school...but high school driver educators, in the U.S. in particular, for years have said there is only one way to become a safe driver-through high school driver education. That is patently absurd.

Graduated licensing and DE

Drivers.com: You would see education in conjunction with graduated driver licensing (GDL) as taking place at a variety of levels, not necessarily through high schools?
O'Neill: We have nothing against high school driver education per se. What we are concerned with are the outrageous claims that have been, and continue to be, made on its behalf, with respect to safety. Everyone has to learn the basic skills of driving. There's many ways to do that and in my mind there's nothing particularly wrong with that taking place in the high school setting as long as the high school district wants to do that...it's a skill that can be taught in high schools or elsewhere. It's the persistent claim that this somehow guarantees safer drivers than any other process can produce, when it most clearly does not, that bothers me.

Drivers.com: Dr. Gary Bloomfield described the Washington State system as the most comprehensive system in the country and he points to rather good statistics to support that.
O'Neill: But they are not scientifically valid because they're not based on random assignments. I'm not saying there's no benefit, but his statistics don't prove it.

Drivers.com: What about other values of training and education? For example, teaching about the culture of the roadway, knowledge of driving techniques, commonly understood procedures for doing things.
O'Neill: Obviously there's nothing wrong with that, but high school driver ed is not the only way to do that. In many American high schools, driver ed is a goof-off class...kids sit around, don't have to work hard...it's been a place for the football coach to make extra money, a throw-away class, in many school districts.

The role of formal education

Drivers.com: Where should formal education stand in the scheme of things?
O'Neill: The evidence still suggests that it really doesn't matter how someone learns to drive, in terms of safety. The initial skill acquisition will still be very incomplete because we cannot spend enough time with these kids to get them to the point where an experienced driver is. The evidence increasingly points in the direction that the skills necessary to become a good driver, and the attitudes, can only be acquired over time. That's why there is so much support for the GDL process around the world. You give beginner drivers the basic skills, then they go through GDL, with controlled exposure to risk through the early years.

Drivers.com: So skills and attitudes develop over time?
O'Neill: That 's where we all fail. We certainly don't change them in the classroom. Attitudes and behavior patterns of teens seem clearly determined by peer groups and all sorts of other pressures that are independent of adult input at that age...we all like to think that we can control the behavior and attitude of our teens but it's a touch-and-go process. My experience with my own kids confirms this...it's a very unpredictable business.

Other benefits of training

Drivers.com: Maybe driver educators should forget about safety and look at the other benefits from formal training.
O'Neill: Not forget safety. We need to talk about and encourage safety belt wearing, to tell teens that high speed is crazy and so on. But we should have no illusions that telling teenagers that driving fast is dangerous will cause them to stop doing it.

Drivers.com: Amongst benefits I see from formal training is the chance to educate individuals about the sociology and psychology of driving and about the concept of cooperativeness as opposed to competitiveness.
O'Neill: Sure, but the extent to which that will succeed is very unpredictable. The very old research that I think is very meaningful is that if you want to know what a kid's driving record will be, look at the driving record of the parent. Kids, like their parents before them, spend all those years subconsciously observing how their fathers or mothers drive.

The future of the coalition

Drivers.com: Will the coalition get funding?
O'Neill: My perception is that there will be no money raised. The last thing Washington needs is yet another special interest organization promoting something that may or may not be a good thing. People I spoke to subsequent to the meeting, including people from the insurance industry and the auto industry, suggest that there will not be money forthcoming from those two industries.

Drivers.com: If that means that dollars that could have gone to developing driver education won't go, is that good or bad?
O'Neill: It's not clear that creating a new organization actually achieves anything. We've created lots of new organizations and one that I know was mentioned at that (summit) meeting was the National Commission Against Drunk Driving. Realistically, that organization has not accomplished much in the many years of its existence. It has a big banquet every year where tables are sold to corporations for fund raising and they give a lot of awards, but what has it accomplished? The answer is nothing. It exists and putters along, and it's yet another organization that sucks up some corporate funding that might go elsewhere or might not. It makes the people in the corporation feel that they are contributing to societal solutions when, in fact, little is being accomplished.

Drivers.com: So, instead of being money being funneled right down to where it would count, the money gets absorbed in the funnel?
O'Neill: Yes. The real $64,000 question for me is, if there is an organization with funding, what would it do that is not currently being done? As far as the proposed coalition is concerned, I don't know the answer to that question.

Funding and GDL

Drivers.com: If you had $10 million, where would you put it?
O'Neill: I'd put it somewhere else, not into driver education. I'd put it into efforts to get really good GDL programs across the states. I'm not sure that the initial acquisition of driving skills is likely to play a major role in safety. Europeans look at North America and say, "Let kids drive at 16? That's crazy. They're not mature enough." We face the interesting dilemma in North America that we depend on the car as basic transportation. Adults are sick of chauffeuring kids by the time they're 16.

I was the classic conflicted parent. When my kids were 16, my wife and I were relieved. We thought, "This is great." But as a professional safety person, I thought my kids were not old enough. But they wouldn't talk to me for the rest of my life if I didn't let them get a license like their peers.

Mobility and safety

Drivers.com: So it's mobility versus safety?
O'Neill: If we were dealing only with safety, we wouldn't let people drive until they were 25. Whether it's speed limits or minimum licensing age, we make trade-offs between conflicting needs. We pay a big price all around the world by letting young people drive when they do. It's a problem in every society. The more the access, the bigger the problem. Society seems to accept this big price.

Drivers.com: Would you formalize the need for driver education in GDL systems?
O'Neill: I think there should be formal driver education as part of it, but I don't think it should be used as a reward system. I don't think any of the processes or periods should be shortened because of driver education. It should be required in addition to the requirements of the system, whether given by a private school or a high school.

Mandatory training

Drivers.com: Should it be mandatory?
O'Neill: I have no problem with that kind of thing being incorporated into a GDL program, but I would not like to see shortening of the period of curfew if teens take driver education. There's no evidence of a payoff. The curfew aspects are very important, and very helpful for parents. In the alcohol area, it used to be common to offer shorter license suspensions if drivers took alcohol education. But people who did not take alcohol education and had longer suspensions actually had better subsequent records. I hope you understand that it's not driver education per se I'm against; it's the idea that it's the silver bullet.