What if we stopped requiring indoor driving classes?

[tolbs17]

North Carolina also doesn't test parallel parking. And my sister says she doesn't want to get her license because of that.

So your sister doesn't want to get a license when potentially the most difficult part of a drivers exam isn't tested? I thought it would've been the opposite.

Well, no...

Many people can probably get by without parallel parking.

What they should teach though - on the road - is when someone is driving and the person in front of them wants to parallel park.   If they see that driver putting on a turn signal and stop just after an open parallel parking spot, don't get right on their ass then be surprised that they start backing up.

Yes, sometimes when I'm driving I get confused by that.

[Scott5114]

Written tests have a completely different function than practical driving tests. The practical tests whether you have the ability to physically operate a car in a safe manner. In my experience, the written primarily tests knowledge of relevant law. The written also functions as a test of knowledge of the MUTCD (from a practical test there's really no way to reliably and safely test the knowledge of what, say, a yield sign means, as there's no way to guarantee that there will be cross traffic to yield to, and an incorrect response could lead to a crash). There are a lot of signs and markings that may not occur anywhere near the testing site but whose meaning needs to be tested.

And to add, when I was getting my restricted license, I literally did almost nothing and my mother just wrote down the hours and they accepted it, I drove just fine and I passed!

You do realize that you just told the whole internet that your parents lied on your hours driven form right?

So, should I cut that part out?

It's generally considered pretty dumb to admit to probably committing a crime to the entire Internet (I dunno how it is in North Carolina but damn near every form you turn into to the state of Oklahoma says that lying on it constitutes perjury). And now it's been quoted by a few people, so it's kind of too late for you to delete it...

[Dirt Roads]

Well I know North Carolina is not one of the states that requires a "signature" to be signed on the driving log.

Actually, NCDMV requires a parental signature on every single one of the Driver's Logs forms that get submitted (both Level 1 and Level 2).  Plus, the required amount of driving for Level 2 cannot be completed on a single sheet unless the student driver takes a lot of long haul segments on cross-country road trips.  Even then, there's a limit to the number of hours that can be logged per week.  https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/downloads/Documents/DL-4A.pdf

[Scott5114]

Well I know North Carolina is not one of the states that requires a "signature" to be signed on the driving log.

Actually, NCDMV requires a parental signature on every single one of the Driver's Logs forms that get submitted (both Level 1 and Level 2).  Plus, the required amount of driving for Level 2 cannot be completed on a single sheet unless the student driver takes a lot of long haul segments on cross-country road trips.  Even then, there's a limit to the number of hours that can be logged per week.  https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/downloads/Documents/DL-4A.pdf

Looking up the law cited on that form, we get the following:

If the Division has cause to believe that a driving log has been falsified, the limited learner's permit holder shall be required to complete a new driving log with the same requirements and shall not be eligible to obtain a limited provisional license for six months.

It doesn't say what happens if the person was able to get a license before the document was discovered to be falsified.

[J N Winkler]

Classroom instruction in driving is still not required in many jurisdictions, and I tend to favor repealing any such requirements.  But new drivers definitely should be required to pass a written test and to demonstrate proficiency behind the wheel.  (It would be hypocritical for me to suggest this should invariably be by a driving test, since I obtained my license without one.  At bare minimum, the applicant should be able to prove successful completion of a driving course that has a significant component of behind-the-wheel instruction.)  I also think there is an excellent argument for a third form of assessment that focuses on hazard perception, such as is being rolled out in many European countries.

[Bruce]

The in-person classes should focus on theory and watching examples of poor judgment and their consequences. There's plenty of dashcam videos out there, but they aren't gruesome enough to scare young drivers into behaving properly.

I can't imagine that education through trauma is either wise or effective.

I got shown "idiots in cars" like videos (most likely from a different Youtube channel) during my classroom time in drivers ed.

An occasional video isn't really what bruce had in mind. He wants a "scared straight" sort of program.

Not necessarily. Doesn't have to be gore, just showing a screwup and the full aftermath of deployed airbags, a crushed car, and going over the kind of injuries to expect would be enough.

Of course this still wouldn't deter the stupidest of the bunch, which is why we need more automated enforcement of high speeds, with actual penalties for unsafe driving.

[J N Winkler]

The gory-film approach was tried in the 1950's, and my driver's education instructors showed one or two of those.  (This was in the early nineties, but I suspect the media materials as well as the equipment, including the simulator, dated from construction of the high school in 1958.)  I still remember a clip featuring a conversation with a quadriplegic.

Ralph Nader's Unsafe at any Speed (1965) decried these films, and driver education in general, as ineffective and not worthy of the discounts that insurance companies were then already extending.

More than fifty years later, I think the evidence base currently favors an emphasis on what goes before (for hazard perception training) than on what comes after, so far as audiovisual materials are concerned.  One approach I've found interesting, but whose effectiveness I don't know to have been tested, is to show the aftermath of an accident from the perspective of someone stuck in a mangled wreck who has to watch as the first responders methodically assemble equipment to perform an extrication.

[CtrlAltDel]

The in-person classes should focus on theory and watching examples of poor judgment and their consequences. There's plenty of dashcam videos out there, but they aren't gruesome enough to scare young drivers into behaving properly.

I can't imagine that education through trauma is either wise or effective.

I got shown "idiots in cars" like videos (most likely from a different Youtube channel) during my classroom time in drivers ed.

An occasional video isn't really what bruce had in mind. He wants a "scared straight" sort of program.

Not necessarily. Doesn't have to be gore, just showing a screwup and the full aftermath of deployed airbags, a crushed car, and going over the kind of injuries to expect would be enough.

Of course this still wouldn't deter the stupidest of the bunch

It's not a question of stupid. The tendency is for people to just zone this stuff out, or to resort to gallows humor in response to it, precisely because gruesomeness, even if it doesn't contain gore, is unpleasant, too unpleasant for people to actually deal with. Especially for people at 15 or so years of age. I mean, this is the general reaction of trained doctors to the death they face. No one, stupid or not, is really going to do anything different.

The result is that the experience you're proposing is ineffective, and worse, triggers disdain for other information being presented.

I get that you're trying to provoke some sort of emotional response in those learning how to drive, but this isn't the way to do so.

[Scott5114]

The gory-film approach was tried in the 1950's, and my driver's education instructors showed one or two of those.  (This was in the early nineties, but I suspect the media materials as well as the equipment, including the simulator, dated from construction of the high school in 1958.)  I still remember a clip featuring a conversation with a quadriplegic.

They were still showing those at my school when I attended drivers-ed classes in the summer of 2005. (Our school building was only a year or two old at that point, but the school administration's worldview dated from 1958.) They had a few films that sounded from the audio quality like they dated from the 1960s or 1970s, and then they had a pair of cops come in and show some videos of scenes they had worked and provide color commentary. (I remember one of the officers going on a wholly unnecessary tangent about the texture of brain matter.)

I very pointedly did not watch the films, instead keeping my eyes focused on the desk in front of me the entire time, both because I simply did not want to see that sort of imagery, and because I resented the fact that the administration apparently thought I was enough of an idiot to think this exercise was necessary for me to come to the conclusion that crashing a car into something was undesirable.

[SectorZ]

Because I swear I imagined this but I asked classmates of mine to confirm, the driver's ed taught at my high school (not by the school, but by a hired company) spent as much time telling us our rights in a DUI stop as they did actual important things.

Probably explains why the townies I know have drunk driving issues.

[kalvado]

Because I swear I imagined this but I asked classmates of mine to confirm, the driver's ed taught at my high school (not by the school, but by a hired company) spent as much time telling us our rights in a DUI stop as they did actual important things.

Probably explains why the townies I know have drunk driving issues.

Probably the other way around. Since there is so much dwi, it may be reasonable to show resulting problems not in fear mongering way, but so that the question "is it worth doing?" comes to student mind without 1257th  repeat of "don't do it!"

[Dirt Roads]

An occasional video isn't really what bruce had in mind. He wants a "scared straight" sort of program.

The gory-film approach was tried in the 1950's, and my driver's education instructors showed one or two of those.  (This was in the early nineties, but I suspect the media materials as well as the equipment, including the simulator, dated from construction of the high school in 1958.)  I still remember a clip featuring a conversation with a quadriplegic.

Ralph Nader's Unsafe at any Speed (1965) decried these films, and driver education in general, as ineffective and not worthy of the discounts that insurance companies were then already extending.

More than fifty years later, I think the evidence base currently favors an emphasis on what goes before (for hazard perception training) than on what comes after, so far as audiovisual materials are concerned.  One approach I've found interesting, but whose effectiveness I don't know to have been tested, is to show the aftermath of an accident from the perspective of someone stuck in a mangled wreck who has to watch as the first responders methodically assemble equipment to perform an extrication. 

Oh yeah.  In our part of West Virginia, we had a driver safety movie from Ohio entitled "Bloody Mary (I recall it was from ODOT, but it may have been OBMV).  That movie had a video clip from a fixed camera mounted along a freeway where someone purportedly got ejected from a car and was beheaded by a guardrail.  The video clip was blacked out just split seconds before the moment of impact; virtually everyone in the class screamed or squealed (or blurted out something inappropriate, and you can just imagine what that means in the middle of Buckwild territory).  I remember being totally convinced that the video must have been faked.  We also had to watch portions of And then there were Four (narrated by James Stewart) and Last Date (which included Dick York, before his Bewitched days).  This all pales in comparison to the third rail power safety video employed by New York City Transit (NYCT).