Ministry gets lesson in how to improve training

Ian Law

BETTER DRIVING

The signs of getting the runaround were all there when I got a response from the Ontario government to my open letter to Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne about the woeful level of driver training in this province.

But I got my foot in the door and it opened — to my great surprise.

In my Wheels column of April 17, I lamented about the poor standards of training and testing of new driver. I hoped to persuade the minister that it was time to seriously review and revamp how we train them.

First, responses from readers came in fast and furious. All stated their support for my concerns. I was, however, expecting to have a strip torn off me by some of the driving schools insisting they do a fantastic job. In fact, the opposite happened; a few told me they would love the opportunity to offer better training.

To give credit where credit is due, MTO has made some improvements such as the graduated licensing system and a slight increase in minimum training hours required for a driving school. However, with only an estimated one in three new drivers taking professional lessons, the extra time required in training is a moot point if the new driver is a product of a family member or friend.

It appears a large proportion of the problem is parents; they put a priority on the cost of the driving course rather than the quality. Reputable driving schools cannot offer a quality course at anywhere near the cost of school offering minimal content to pass MTO’s requirements..

On top of that, nothing is cheaper than good ol’ mom or dad teaching young Johnny or Jane, which is sure to strain the relationship and guaranteed to pass on bad driving habits. It is absolutely shocking to me that any parent would sacrifice quality of driving instruction to save a few hundred dollars. After all, driving is the leading cause of death in people aged 16 to 25.

The main crux of our motoring mayhem is the absurdly low standards of testing required to earn a driver’s licence. This breeds minimal training, as the goal becomes only to pass the test, not building the safest drivers. With both the testing facilitator and training establishments being private enterprises, their main objective is profit.

What is required to pass a G2 driving exam can be as little as negotiating three left turns, three right turns and a parallel park. The cheapest driving schools can teach those requirements with minimal effort.

The minister’s office didn’t reply to my letter until June 8 when the director of program development and evaluation branch, Paul Harbottle responded to an email version I sent in directly to the minister’s office. The initial response was more of a “thank you for contacting us but we have made some improvements . . . have a nice day” kind of brush-off. That wasn’t good enough for me.

So I replied to Harbottle and noted there seemed to be a lack interest in my experiences and observations from years of advanced driver training.

The next communiqué surprised me: an invitation to Queen’s Park from Andrew Hurd, policy adviser for road user safety. Quite frankly I was expecting to be addressing a couple of civil servants who had the time to meet with a journalist/dvanced driving instructor and had all the politically correct prepared lines.

I was more impressed when Hurd introduced me to Harbottle as well as Dave Penfield, chief of staff to Minister Wynne, Rob Fleming, assistant deputy minister, road user safety division, and Keith Madill, manager, evaluation and training office, program development and evaluation branch, road user safety division.

At the meeting, they listened, asked questions and really did want to know more about my views on driver education and testing. When I relayed some concerns from other instructors about the new Basic Driver Education curriculum and some questionable testing, they were genuinely alarmed.

I invited the officials and the minister out to our advanced driving school to experience for themselves exactly what can be taught to make safer drivers. To save more lives and money would require fundamental and drastic changes to our training and testing requirements. I left them with the following conclusions.

1. Professional driver education needs to be mandatory for all, period!

2. Driver education must reflect the complexity of today’s driving. The curriculum should be much more comprehensive and include more driving exercises and simulator experience. New (and experienced drivers for that matter) need to learn skills such as collision avoidance, skid recovery, emergency stopping and lane changes, vision training, driving information processing, winter driving skills etc. and not only simple skills such as parallel parking and turns.

3. Instructors need to be proficient in these skills and capable of properly training new drivers. They also need to be trained in teaching skills such as communication and powers of observation. We need to thoroughly retrain the instructors.

4. The driver’s exam needs to test the real world driving skills of new drivers. Can they control a vehicle in an emergency, make critical traffic decisions, process information and not just park on a hill. On top of this, every driver should be required to take a refresher course every 10 years to correct bad driving habits and learn new skills.

The ball is now in MTO’s court. They listened and appeared to genuinely care. Now they just need to get out more.

ianlaw@carcontrolschool.com

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