Learn to drive... in school

Youth Voice: It can only contribute to safer roads.

It seems that nearly everything has been tried in an effort to reduce the deaths on Ireland’s roads in recent times: large signs informing people of the death rate, numerous well documented safety campaigns on TV, radio and beyond, and yet nothing seems to have changed. Our roads are still just as dangerous and the amount of people, especially young people, dying on the roads is still unacceptably high.

For all the efforts to reduce road deaths, the one measure that would perhaps do the best job has been widely overlooked, that is the introduction of driver’s education into schools. The crux of our existing problem on the roads is that drivers are being bombarded with road safety campaigns while simultaneously feeling completely detached from what is going on. It might be a bit of a cliché but it seems that some people on the roads don’t consider that the tragedies reported on a daily basis on our roads are of particular relevance to their lives. Invariably the “it’ll never happen to me” attitude soon dissipates when an accident occurs, but by that stage, it’s all too late. It’s important then, that you foster an air of responsibility in future drivers as soon as possible.

There have been even recent suggestions to increase the minimum driving age to 21 but to do that is to miss the point entirely. Maturity isn’t necessarily correlated to age, and pushing back the minimum age only means that drivers start to learn later in life the lessons they should ideally know inside out by the time they’re 18. If potential drivers are taught the fundamentals of safe, responsible road usage as early on in the game as possible then it can only contribute to safer roads.

Of course, the other major thing that will contribute to safer roads is…safer roads. Motorways and dual carriageways and what have you are all very well and good, but around the country there are easily hundreds of stretches that are more pothole than road, and others where local knowledge is the only means of determining how truly dangerous they are. There are countless local roads in Ireland that professional rally drivers would find hard going, so it’s small wonder that a good deal of accidents occur on these very roads.

For all the well-intentioned campaigners and activists who are trying to make our roads safer, the true battle to comprehensively educate young people on the responsibilities they have to maintain and the dangers they face, while also making the roads less dangerous to travel on in the first place, is simply not being fought.

By: Paddy Duffy

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