This is quite inaccurate. During 2007, the fatality rate per 100 million kilometers was 0.75; convert that into miles, and the rate is 1.21 per 100 million miles, vs. 1.36 in the US during the same year.

Look at a state-by-state breakdown for Australia, and you can see that every state and territory aside from Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland has fatality rates that exceed those of the US average. Australia’s worst state is far worse than the US’ lowest performer (Northern Territory at 5.13 per 100 million miles versus Montana at 2.4) and its best underperforms the US (Victoria at 0.92, which is below Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont and Minnesota).

http://algin.net/austroads/site/Index.asp?id=15

Again, it’s difficult to compare fatality rates internationally, given differences in demography; rural areas generally have considerably higher death rates than do urban areas.

Also, without knowing how a “fatality” is defined in Australia, it’s difficult to know if we’re even comparing apples to oranges here. The US uses the broadest definition possible, so the Aussie data will either be similar or else be understated in comparison, depending upon what that is.

Cars are becoming safer from implementing different features.

You’re correct about that, and I misread your post re: ABS, so my apologies for that.

To clarify, passive safety features such as seat belts and air bags do work. The active features that are supposed to make us better drivers, such as ABS and third brake lights, generally have a short-term benefit but ultimately lose their effectiveness as drivers adjust.

The original post’s belief that training is key has been disproven, time and time again. As insulting as they may seem to be, the nanny systems that allow us to be less like ourselves are what do the most good. It’s really the human element that is the problem, and like it or not, the technology that allows us to be less impulsive and in control tends to be what accomplishes the most.

* Long distances travelled every day by loads of folks
* Lots of near empty rural B roads with little enforcement and little attention to road design and maintenance
* Similar levels of driver crappiness
* Similar ages of car fleets
* Somewhat similar mix of car sizes (we have lots of SUVs and large rear wheel drive sedans along with loads more hatchbacks and Euro oddities

There are marked differences though:

* We have uniform 35 year old seatbelt laws that are strictly enforced. Not wearing a seatbelt (driver or passenger) is expensive in $$$ and points to both the driver and the unbelted passenger.

* Hand held mobile phone use is banned in all states since 2002. Hands free is now banned too, but not in every state yet (AFAIK). The fine is astronomical ($500+) and 5 points is harsh. If only it applied to make up application and other stupid things you see on the roads.

* Our uniform BAC limit is 0.05 for most drivers and is strictly enforced for 30+ years with roadside blood and breath testing. It’s 0.00 for newbie drivers. We now have roadside drug testing, too. This did more than seatbelts in terms of reducing our death toll. Still, folks die from booze every day. I think mandatory interlocks are the way to go for those who’ve been lost their license even for a 0.51 infraction. Once a drug user, always a drug user.

* We are about have mandatory ESC and mandatory passenger airbags. We already have mandatory ABS and driver airbags. The government is already advertising on TV that you should not buy cars that do not have these features. The stats show that cars with these technologies are about 30% more likely to save your life than the same exact car without them. I’ve not had a car without them since 2001, and I’m never going back.

* Unfortunately, we have speed cameras and photo laser / radar everywhere. I have to drive past 12 speed cameras between home and my nearest large city. It’s pure revenue raising, and unrelated to safety. We have seen speed enforcement go through the roof and no consequential drop in roadside statistics since 2002.

Our death rate per mile is about half the US rate.

Yet, the folks who continue to be over representative in death statistics here are the young and stupid. They’re about to make it illegal for folks under 21 to have passengers after dark, and probably not able to drive (i.e curfew) if you’re a probationary driver after midnight til dawn to stop the massacre from the nightclubs. Unlike America, Australians drink too excess with actual alcohol and we like it that way. I really do think stopping the drink and drive culture is about the only way to stop young folks wrapping themselves around trees.

There’s a curvey bit of road in the hills near Melbourne that’s responsible for about 40 motorcycling deaths every year, which is about 1/8th of our entire road toll. I would like that road closed to motorcyclists. But as most folks who die there are in their 40-50’s, and thus the sort of voters that the government likes to pander to, I doubt it would happen.

Cause I most definitely don’t see many states increasing the difficulty in which it’s citizens can get and keep their licences at the moment. Which is the only way to increase requirements for driver license training.

No, we aren’t. Once again, academic research on this subject is quite clear and pretty much close to unanimous:

-Basic driver’s ed doesn’t reduce crash rates, because training doesn’t temper risk taking.

-Behind the wheel advanced/ defensive courses don’t reduce crash rates, and at least in the case of young males can actually lead to increased crash rates due to overconfidence created by the training.

-Courses taught in the US don’t work.

-Courses taught outside of the US don’t work.

These premises have been supported, time and time again, in studies conducted throughout the world, both in the US and outside of it. They don’t support and they directly contradict your position.

Sorry, but if you want to help us with teen drivers, then give them bus passes to keep them from driving. While you’re at it, also lobby to create a graduated licensing system for new drivers.

The problems with restrictions is that they need to be enforced for them to be effective.

That would be an argument in favor of raising the driving age, not for more training that doesn’t work and actually makes things worse. We don’t need confident teens with skidpad training, we need teens who prefer bicycles, walking and public transportation.

So how do the Germans do it, and how do the Spaniards and Italians not do it?

This I can’t prove, but I suspect that a lot of it is largely cultural. Orderly, predictable behavior is much better for safe driving, and some cultures are just more prone to self-imposed order and self-discipline.

It also helps to have a high percentage of traffic using interstate-type roads. They’re much safer than non-divided highways with intersections, even with the faster travel speeds. The ability to reduce head-on collisions can save a lot of lives.

We are arguing two completely different things here. I do not teach driver’s ed. I do not teach teens basic laws of the roads or how to properly merge. I teach them how to respect the vehicle they are in (or as you put it fear)and understand the gravity of the responsibility they have. We do this by showing them what not to do and showing them what to do. Driver’s ed courses, as currently designed and implemented by individual states do not do this I think you would be hard pressed to find any peer-reviewed article that looks at the sort of driver’s education I think needs to be required instead of the type that is currently being implemented.

Everyone who has looked into the matter knows that inexperience, risk taking, and lack of mental development are all the reasons why teens do what they do. The only way to fix inexperience is through gaining more experience, that is what we try to do in our class.

We put teens through evasive maneuver to help them learn the muscle memory needed to avoid crashes. Otherwise, they only learn when they are in the situation in the real world, where it could be a life or death outcome. I fail to see how teaching a child how to properly execute an emergency lane change maneuver or regain control in a skid can do any harm. We show our teens how easy it is to lose control of a vehicle, and how it can happen with even low speeds to help get across the dangers of speed and risky driving.

The problems with restrictions is that they need to be enforced for them to be effective. In Colorado, for example, cell phone use is banned for new drivers, but a recent AAA study 66 percent of Colorado teens still talk on their phone while they drive, and half text message. From stories my students have told me it is obvious that enforcement is lacking. Parents are also oblivious to many of the dangers and the laws to enforce them themselves. But you can’t take education away from someone.

AAA Colorado survey: http://www.encompassmag.com/tds_2007/tds_responses_charts.html

The data indicates that the opposite is true.

This is an old study, but the abstract postulates otherwise. There will be no resolution because we annoyingly keep changing more than one variable. Cars are becoming safer from implementing different features.

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/regrev/evaluate/808206.html

It probably isn’t possible to change, because you can’t alter hormonal-driven personalities and self-centered, narcissistic behavior with training.

So how do the Germans do it, and how do the Spaniards and Italians not do it? Enforcement and civil penalties, maybe?

Clarification: it’s not (all) hormones and narcissism, it’s also that, before ~21 years of age, the human brain hasn’t fully developed. One of the areas that develops very, very late is the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in short-term consequence management.

You could, colloquially, say that anyone under 21 or so is functionally impaired in a very specialized fashion. You could also, then, make the case for raising the age for licensed** drivers to 21***. Given what I’ve seen of insurance rate tables, this would help immensely.

You could probably do this without fear of retribution, too, because the young have no money and don’t vote, and often can’t be bothered to vote until they hit 50 or so.

** or at lease driving without someone >21 in the passenger’s seat.

*** And drinking. And conscription. And firearm ownership and/or use. And voting—my first two elections were wasted on youthful idiocy.

The data indicates that the opposite is true. Fatality rates keep falling, in spite all of these other factors (speed, unskilled drivers) that the average person believes are the cause of accidents. If you were correct, fatality rates would not be declining.

As taught, drivers ed is a waste of time and money, but can’t it be taught per your earlier observation?

It probably isn’t possible to change, because you can’t alter hormonal-driven personalities and self-centered, narcissistic behavior with training.

What needs to be understood is that this belief that accidents are caused by a lack of skills is a complete fallacy. Accidents are caused by improper attitudes that lead to recklessness or disregard for one’s social obligations as a user of public highways, not by a lack of technical or motor skills.

Many people get awfully annoyed with the idea that training doesn’t help, as they believe that skills matters and wish to think that they are superior to other drivers. But the facts of the situation lead to logical conclusions that the average driver doesn’t want to hear, including that the average driver is just average.

Politically incorrect as they may be, the most effective requirements would focus on restricting teen drivers, adding more safety technology to vehicles, and diverting as much traffic as possible away from city streets and onto interstates and public transportation. But when you have a culture where everyone is convinced that he is above average (a statistical impossibility), then it’s going to be tough to make that stick.

If you want the kids to drive safely, then teach them to have enough patience and a healthy fear of death that they don’t collide into things and other people.

pch101@12:44

It’s basically a waste of money and doesn’t produce any benefit beyond imparting basic mechanical skills, such as steering, to those who don’t have them.

As taught, drivers ed is a waste of time and money, but can’t it be taught per your earlier observation?

We’ve seen that adding features like ABS may have no effect because people adjust to accept the same level of perceived risk. Good example – if you want to cut speeding, just bring back bias belted tire technology and outlaw everything else.

I love ABS, airbags, stability control. I don’t mind proximity warning features but I don’t like the idea of government mandated active controls that are based on fuzzier logic, like the FCW and LDWS systems. As an engineer, I have some experience on how hard it is to go from blue skying to almost ready to really ready to deploy. Government, CARB for example, seems heedless of the difficulties in getting it right. The devil is in the details, and I’d like the early adopters to help work them out – if they choose the option – and at their expense, not mine. Audi and Lexus owners can afford to find out.

Translated: You can’t provide two peer-reviewed academic studies written in the last four decades that prove your point.

I’m familiar with the body of research and the consensus views of researchers. Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that you can’t find it, because you won’t find a whole lot of credible work that backs your position.

It is no secret in the academic community that driver training is ineffective. If you take the time to read the studies, you will note that the discussion accounts for the fact that driver’s education is widely understood to be ineffective.

Any academic who argued that driver’s education was useful would be fighting an uphill battle with his peers, because they would be obliged to disprove all of the well-known research to date that states otherwise. The facts may go against the instincts of politicians, the average driver and driving instructors, but they are what they are.

The subject of teen defensive driving has been studied to death, and driver’s education has not been shown to reduce crash rates. Here is just one example from a NHTSA report to Congress, which is very much just like everything else you’ll find on this topic:

Many carefully conducted studies of driver education in the United States and abroad have failed to provide evidence for decreased crash rates among teen drivers who have participated in driver education programs (e.g., Jones, 1993; Mayhew & Simpson, 1996; Vernick et. al., 1999; Williams & Ferguson, 2004; Wynne-Jones & Hurst, 1985)…

…(Driver’s education) does not appear to result in long-term reduction in crash rates for novice drivers. Teens do not get into crashes because they are uninformed about the basic rules of the road or safe driving practices; rather, studies show they are involved in crashes as a result of inexperience and risk-taking. Given this history of mixed results on the ability of driver education to positively affect crash performance, it is unlikely that an educational program alone, no matter how well designed and implemented, would result in dramatic reductions in teen crash rates.

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/staticfiles/DOT/NHTSA/Traffic%20Injury%20Control/Articles/Associated%20Files/811005.pdf

“I understand quite well that driving instructors are trying to make a living by making false claims about the benefits of driver training.” Now that is just hateful. I volunteer for a non profit that teaches teens: vehicle dynamics, visual skills, speed control and car control. We don’t make any money. We charge just enough to cover our costs. We do not make false claims. We are all professional drivers who know first hand what a difference knowing can make.

I could say the same of you.

Elsewhere on this site, I have posted examples of academic studies on this subject. You may find them if you look.

More to the point, the studies that I’ve cited previously are indicative of the research on this subject. You will be hard pressed to find anybody with academic credentials in this field who claims that driver’s education is effective; the opinions against it are nearly unanimous. Research conducted throughout the developed world indicates the opposite, consistently, and the literature is written with that understanding in mind.

Here’s a challenge to you: post two peer-reviewed academic studies authored in the last 40 years that shows that driver’s education has more than a temporary, limited impact on passenger car traffic accidents and fatalities.

we are driving less this year than we were last year and that is why this most recent drop happened.

You apparently don’t understand the data. The fatality rate is a rate. It is adjusted for the mileage, as it is expressed on a per mile basis (VMT = rate per 100 million vehicle miles.)

Except for a brief period during the early to mid 60s when fatality rates were increasing, the overall trend has been downward since we began keeping statistics. Last year was not glaringly different than any other period.

I fear that you don’t have a clear understanding of what defensive drivers training is designed to do for new drivers.

I understand quite well that driving instructors are trying to make a living by making false claims about the benefits of driver training. It’s basically a waste of money and doesn’t produce any benefit beyond imparting basic mechanical skills, such as steering, to those who don’t have them.

“Road course training tends to lead to more accidents, because it encourages the students to become overconfident and drive too aggressively. It backfires, especially with young males.”

One teen defensive driving class in Florida has students with a 63 percent lower crash rate than state average. These classes teach teens how to AVOID crashes, what to do in dangerous situations and how to drive defensively so that they aren’t put in dangerous situations. They do not encourage dangerous behavior. I teach at a class in California, Driving Concepts, if we have a student who is cocky we give him/her special attention in order to remove the attitude they have and make them realize that they are not invincible.

“The death rates have dropped because people are driving less and therefore the traffic density is lower.

Absolutely false. Look at the data above — Americans are driving almost four times the miles now that they were in the early 60’s. ”

Perhaps, but we are driving less this year than we were last year and that is why this most recent drop happened. Increased driving since the 1960s was a big reason for more deaths, as well as schools dropping driver’s ed (I’m going to guess). Safety equipment has done a lot over the past fifty years to improve our chances out on the road, both in crash avoidance and survival, but I feel now that it is going way too far.

You are totally right about rural areas having more crashes than urban ones. You have a good point about response times, but there are other reasons for that as well. More open roads mean higher speeds and the states with the worst drivers training laws are typically rural states. In some of these states, like Alabama and Tennessee deaths of new drivers are actually increasing, not decreasing like the national trend.

I fear that you don’t have a clear understanding of what defensive drivers training is designed to do for new drivers. It definitely reduces crash risk and makes teens better drivers.

I work 11PM to 7AM and the bus between my little ‘burb and Omaha, which stops just 3 blocks from my home, quits running @ 6:30 PM, so I gotta get up @ the crack of 8:30PM to be out front shovelling/clearing the Ranger of snow and ice by 8:45 so I’m ready to roll by 9:30–10PM.

If I had, say, a 9:45 PM bus, I could sleep-in 45 minutes-1 hour before doing the old “Dagwood Bumstead in 4-buckle overshoes” dash for the bus stop and the sun could hopefully have the snow softened for me when I wake @ 1PM from my morning nap the next day.

You’re citing myths that have been disproven. There are plenty of countries with strict licensing regimes, such as Spain and Italy, that have consistently higher fatality rates than the US (and that’s despite the fact that the US definition of “fatality” is among the broadest used — a “traffic fatality” does not have the same meaning in every nation, with the US definition encompassing the largest group possible.)

There is no correlation between fatality rates and the difficulty in getting a license. Some countries with stricter training have lower rates, others have higher rates. Cherry picking the data is misleading — the UK and Finland have some of the lowest fatality rates in the world. The US tends to be better than most, not as good as some.

This is, by the way, why my kids are going to be professionally trained to drive a car properly before they are allowed behind the wheel on a public road.

Road course training tends to lead to more accidents, because it encourages the students to become overconfident and drive too aggressively. It backfires, especially with young males.

If you want the kids to drive safely, then teach them to have enough patience and a healthy fear of death that they don’t collide into things and other people. Highway safety comes not from skilled evasive maneuvers, which almost never help, but from stupidity and machismo avoidance. The best driving skill that you can have is a good attitude.

The death rates have dropped because people are driving less and therefore the traffic density is lower.

Absolutely false. Look at the data above — Americans are driving almost four times the miles now that they were in the early 60’s.

Traffic density actually correlates positively with lower fatality rates. Rural fatality rates, particularly on non-freeways, are substantially higher than they are in urban areas. One critical reason for this is because it takes first responders more time to become aware of collisions and to reach a rural scene following an accident, so there are more traffic deaths during the “golden hour,” which are spared in more urbanized areas where help can arrive in time more often.

The US is a large country with a disproportionately high rural population compared to most other developed nations. Just so long as the US has different demographics, it will probably always have higher fatality rates than the UK, where less of the population lives or travels in isolated areas.

Stern is right: risk compensation or in more fancy terms, risk homeostasis, is the name of the game where many safety systems are concerned. ABS is great because it lets you tailgate with more control.

I do think ESC is great for the principal reason that it goes a long way to preventing rollovers of SUV’s – the best and easiest way to die in an SUV – at least when they roll because of last second evasive maneuvers. If they roll from direct impact with a lesser car – say… a sentra – then they still suffer.

My own personal gripe with daytime running lights is that they are only on in front. For example, driving in New York State, where headlights are required with windshield-wiper use, on a dark, cold, rainy day is not that big a deal. Everyone has their headlights turned on, so you can see on-coming cars, and you can see the cars in front of you because their rear lights are on.

Same weather in Quebec, where daytime running lights are standard… nobody turns on their headlights because “they’re already on” so you can see all the oncoming traffic on the other side of the divided highway, but have a really hard time seeing the cars that are directly in front of you, except when they’re actively braking – This is not safe!

I worry that technologies like this will just breed lazier and less attentive drivers. Why pay attention if there is a program that does that for you? Fewer crashes, yes. But also fewer people who can actually drive.

+1. To me the electronic intervention versus (proper) driver training comparison is like using a calculator versus learning long division. The average driver has become more and more disengaged from the act of driving, to the point of it being scary. How often does an accident description you read in the newspaper or on the web include the words “lost control of the car”? A car is a machine; barring a mechanical failure you can’t lose control of it. You did something (or more often, didn’t do something) to make the car do what it did. Proper driver training teaches you this. Unfortunately proper driver training costs more than what most people are willing to spend in this country.

Comparing the statistics with those I could find for the UK http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle/AllCars/241056/
the reality of how bad the US road death rate becomes clearer. Per 1 million people 123 people died last year in the US as a result of road deaths 42 people in the UK.

US UK
Road deaths 37313 2538
Year of figures 2008 2008
Population 303 61
Deaths/ million miles 122.97 48.25
Billion miles driven 4732 312
deaths /100 mil miles 1.27 0.94

The death rates have dropped because people are driving less and therefore the traffic density is lower. There is nothing to suggest the driving standard has improved.

I think the problem is 3 fold – and 2 of 3 come down to driver education.

1st the test does not include any form of car control – how about having to pass a skid pan test?

2nd once a test is passed there is no incentive (or nationwide scheme) for people to improve their driving skills.

3rd Driver distractions have increase in resent year, now everyone is testing or changing the song on their IPod or adjusting their Sat Nav – lets use the technology to improves these distractive nature of these devices – ban the use of hand held phones and make all sat nav units, ipods etc voice activated.

(Sorry for going on a bit but as you can tell this is one of my soap boxes!)

Remember – we all work for the ruling class in Washington. We need them because we are all toothless hicks who do not possess their superior intellect and abilities.

Well, why don’t we fix the problem and stop trying to mitigate it with nanny technology? We need better driver’s education! We need to teach people how to drive! The current system focuses more on the rules of the road than it does the craft of driving. Because of it we’re stuck with technologies like that trying to save us from our own inadiquacies.

Forward collision warning and lane departure warnings are already prewired into all drivers. It’s called your eyes. If you are observant and not text messaging or fussing with your make up or staring at the bumper of the car 2 feet in front of you then there is no reason why you should need something to beep and flash to let you know that something is about to happen. You should already be aware of it.

I worry that technologies like this will just breed lazier and less attentive drivers. Why pay attention if there is a program that does that for you? Fewer crashes, yes. But also fewer people who can actually drive.

As a car (and motorcycle) loving “leftie”, I’ll ignore the pointless blanket generalization and ask: what do you have against public transit?

True, but that’s a combination of cars being far too easy to drive, “training” being a joke, our cultural bias towards driving as a right rather than a privilege, and driving being more necessity than convenience in all but the largest cities (and sometimes not even then.)

Take Finland’s approach to driver training, and you would have better results here, even though the training would be more expensive. Here in the US, I was “trained” by coasting a car (don’t touch the gas!) around and around a track at my high school until I’d put in the required number of hours. Terrifying to think that I was on the street like that (and four accidents in two years to show for it, not speeding or dangerous driving, just not knowing what I was doing.)

Or get rid of all the automatics. If you can’t drive a stickshift, you can’t drive. An amazing number of drivers would be off the road if this happened. Hell, most drivers don’t even know how to change a tire, either.

You can’t demand better training or restrict drivers, though, until they’ve broken the law, provided they’ve done the minimum. That’s because we have to have our freedom, our right, to drive — which apparently includes our freedom, our right to be incompetent and dangerous.

Finally, without public transportation options, people who know they shouldn’t be driving do it anyway, because they need to get to work and the grocery store. It’s ridiculous. I know a few people like that personally, who hate driving and wish they didn’t need to do it, and are terrified on a daily basis. These are not good drivers.

This is, by the way, why my kids are going to be professionally trained to drive a car properly before they are allowed behind the wheel on a public road. No way am I letting them out there as poorly trained as I was.

There is absolutely no reason not to improve cars, improve roads, improve training, require periodic re-certification and strictly enforce traffic rules. These aren’t do one or the other type things.

“No more French Fries in schools. We all have to be limited by the lowest common denominator… It’s all about the dumbing down of America.”

Does high French Fry consumption correlate with intellectual ability and achievement?

“I would still prefer having my fate in my own hands rather than public transportation.”

Fine, but that has absolutely nothing to do with your personal safety or the safety of those sharing the road with you. Personal airplanes kill their occupants at a rate many times higher than commercial airplanes do, yet the pilot of a personal airplane enjoys the false sense of security which comes from having fate in their own hands.

I understand the desire to have my own damn hands on the wheel, but I have also had to reluctantly admit that the illusion of greater security I get by driving myself to Portland instead of taking the train or flying is in fact an illusion.

Feelings are feelings. Data is data. The two are not the same thing.

The definition comes straight from your own link. You need to read the footnotes, so that you know how to interpret what is presented.

A “passenger-train mile” is a mile traveled by a train that carries passengers. That allows for the exclusion of data from trains that aren’t carrying passengers.

I would still prefer having my fate in my own hands rather than public transportation.

That may be true, but then just admit that safety doesn’t really have anything to do with it. You claimed that safety was important to you, even though safety isn’t actually playing a role in how you form your preferences. If fatality data was truly that important to you, you’d prefer rail.

I would still prefer having my fate in my own hands rather than public transportation.