A Message from the Instructors
What is Your Priority When You are Driving?
Welcome to our Driver Education course. Driving is fun and it is fun to have the freedom that comes with a driver’s license.
As you go through our course material, you may notice that most of it is presented in a serious manner. There is a good reason for this.
The advice I give to student drivers is based on safety—safety as the number-one priority.
It makes sense, because car crashes are the top killer of teenagers in America. All my course material is presented from the perspective of long-term safety and risk reduction.
Stop for a second and think about it. What is more important than being safe—to be sure you, your passengers, and innocent people around you are not harmed by your driving?
Safety should always be at the top of your list. What other things could replace safety at the top of a driver’s mental list of priorities?
-Show off
-Be cool
-Advertise my mood
-Entertain myself with speed thrills
-Test my skills on a public road
-Emulate movie stars (or at least their stunt doubles)
-Demonstrate my lack of respect for the law
-Rebellion against authority
-Display my bad habits
-Always leave home late and try to make up the time on the road
Now, you look at this list and add anything I may have missed. Then ask yourself what is most important when you drive.
It is obvious that safety should be at the top of your list. Nothing in the list above is important in the long-term. The big picture. Think about 8 years from now. Ask yourself which of the items above will be important eight years from now. None of them. Check again. I’m right. None of those will matter.
Many teens will look back on their behavior in high school and wish they had acted more maturely. Maybe you, maybe not, but many will. The fact is, all of the items on the list above are kid stuff.
You can watch drivers on the road and you can see who does and who does not have safety as their priority.
I think most drivers think they are being safe, but really, safety is not on their list. They are hurried, distracted, angry, being cool, (even adults show off), or whatever. But most act as if safety happens by accident. The items on the list above may be "kid stuff" but many adults act immature on the road.
You, the new driver, and the entire new generation of drivers, need to be better than that. The truth is, you have very little experience compared with the average driver. Now, if you display all the negative attributes of the "average" driver, who really does not spend any mental effort at cultivating a safe driving attitude, then you will be a worse driver than everyone else. And when hundreds of you (new drivers) take to the road, the driving situation will get worse and more people will get hurt or die.
Lack of experience + bad habits + immature attitude = high crash rate.
If you and your peers hit the roads with new drivers licenses, and you actively think and act as if safety is a top priority, you can still have fun and make Guam a safer place, too!
Now here is where I tell it like it is: If the items on the list above really appeal to you more than safety; if you really think it is OK to have any of those things be a higher priority than safety, I don’t want to share the road with you. I have children in my car and I don’t want to get hurt or killed, either.
If I help you get a driver’s license and you hurt yourself or someone else, I haven’t helped you at all.
Now you know why the material presented in this course is all tinted the color of safety.
Have fun and be safe!
Teen Drivers: Kids or Adults?
In our society, adults look after the children and protect them. Children expect to be protected by adults. That's the way things are.
When you are under 18, you are a child. You have spent your entire life on the "child" side of the line. All your life, others have looked after you and protected you from hamful influences. Sometimes you make a terrible mistake and the adults in your life protect you from the consequenses of your actions or decisions.
When you drive, you are on the adult side of the equation. Even if you are only 15 or 16, there are parents who are counting on you to behave like an adult when you drive. You must think before you act. As a child, you have the luxury of doing something silly and then say, "oops," and someone cleans up the mess for you.
Now, you are responsible, not only for yourself, but for the safety of other people who are sharing the road with you. Think before you act.
I have taught high school. I have seen that just about every class has a certain percent of students who are there just to cause trouble. They are not there to learn or to prepare themselves for the future. The only goal they have in class is to impress their friends with the most inappropriate behavior they can get away with.
Then, when school is over, those same kids get behind the wheel of a car, or even worse, a big pickup or SUV. Do their goals change from the classroom to the car? Or do they still have one thing in mind: to impress their friends with the most inappropriate behavior they can get away with? Do you want to share the road with those guys? What if you had a tiny baby in your car?
In the high school classroom, that student is a child, and I guess we expect them to behave like children. After all, a teacher is not allowed to leave them unattended, even for a few minutes. Then, after school, we expect them to behave like adults on the public road where their antics can kill or maim other people.
Here is the point:
If you are driving, you must learn how to think like an adult. If too many high school students act like children on the road, don’t be surprised when the law-makers entertain a bill to raise the driving age to 18.
And please do not make me regret helping you get a license.
Strategy for Surviving a Lifetime of Driving.
If you are a young driver, in your teens or even twenties, you can anticipate you will be driving for at least 50 years. I believe most people don't think about that.
During those 50 years of driving, there will be at least one time, one incident, where your response will be the difference between a close call and a major crash. Think about that for a second.
You cannot spend your entire driving career expecting other drivers to keep you out of danger.
You need to think about the big picture—how to reduce the risk for the long-term.
Here are three strategies I see people employ. See which one is worthy of you.
#1 Most popular strategy: LUCK
Many drivers just do random stuff on the road. They speed, change lanes unnecessarily, change lanes in intersections and go through red lights. If mom and dad are doing that, it’s hard for me to teach it’s wrong. For one thing, They get to teach you for 16 years, and I get to teach you for a few hours. And Dad’s cool (he goes so fast the cops don’t even bother chasing him) and I, the nerdy driving teacher, am uncool.
But really, is that a good strategy? We all know bad things only happen to other people, right? You read about them in the newspaper. Faulty logic alert!
If you ignore procedure, rules of the road and traffic laws, if you drive as if you are immortal and nothing bad could ever happen no matter what you do, then you are relying on luck. And luck is notoriously unreliable. Luck runs out.
You could say, "Hey, I’ve been doing this for years and nothing bad ever happens."
Until something happens. Do you really think that you can rely on luck to keep you safe for 50 years of driving?
You can spot the drivers who rely on luck. They are obviously not thinking as they drive. They mindlessly do things that no thinking person would do. They do random actions on the road without regard for possible consequenses. They just assume nothing bad will ever happen. Dumb strategy. You need to do better than that.
#2 SKILL
What’s wrong with skill? How can you be a good driver if you don’t exercise skill?
Well, I’ll tell you. Good driving does not take a lot of skill. Oh, there are things you need to learn and practice, but the most important things to learn and practice are looking ahead and slowing down early so you can respond to developing traffic situations.
The skills you are probably thinking of are more like stunt driving.
I call this strategy "Breaking the Law with Skill". Because you really don’t need more than the basic skills to drive a car. Advanced driving skills are unnecessary if you keep yourself out of trouble by practicing Advanced Defensive Driving. And that means obeying traffic laws, don’t over-drive your visibility or your ability to respond to unexpected things, like a kid running out into the road between two parked cars.
Let’s use the example above: a kid runs out between two cars parked on the side of the road.
A good driver will be going a reasonable speed. He will be alert to clues and potential problems as he approaches the parked cars. He will keep an eye on the cars, and maybe even look under the cars to see if any little feet are there. He will see the potential danger of the situation and take his foot off the gas pedal and cover the brake. Whe the kid runs out, his foot is over the brake already, he has lost some speed and he is actively watching the cars for movement. He can stop in time.
The bad driver, the one who thinks he is good because of his lightning-fast kung-fu-fighting reflexes and amazing hand-eye coordination which have been fine-tuned by video games, does not recognize the inherent danger in the situation of the cars parked on the side of the road. He is going way too fast to stop and his foot is on the gas pedal. He is oblivious because he thinks he does not have to obey traffic laws or manage his space and time. He is invincible. Unfortunately, the child who ran out into the road is not invincible. And our "skillful" driver simply cannot respond to the unexpected child. The only way to respond is to respond in advance, before it’s an emergency. That means going an appropriate speed and looking ahead and covering the brake pedal. Mr. Skill does none of these things. He doesn’t have too; he thinks he is a "good driver".
Breaking-the-law-with-skill is immature and irresponsible. It is terrible driving. It is just plain wrong to bet the lives of those people around you as you play a high-stakes game of chance using your vehicle as a weapon.
Statisics from the 80’s show that drivers who have received special training for stunt-style driving have higher crash rates than the general population. That is because they do not practice risk reduction. They feel their skills are enough. They are not enough.
#3 ACTIVELY REDUCE THE RISK
This is really the only strategy that works for the long term.
Like the good driver above in #2, he looks ahead, looks for clues, does not assume that nothing unexpected will happen. He travels at a reasonable speed so he has time and space to respond to whatever happens.
He is focused on the task of driving and is not distracted by other things.
He has a valuable habit; he covers the brake pedal when he sees anything suspicious. He does not follow too close to the car in front, and he leaves home a few minutes early intead of a few minutes late.
He shows respect for the law, and in doing so, also shows respect for the community and his fellow travellers.
This kind of driving takes training, practice and discipline, but not a great deal of skill.
In fact, many times I tell student drivers that they are the best drivers on the road because they are at least trying to do what is right.
I do not teach fancy evasive driving because there is no need for it if you actively stay out of trouble by practicing your risk reduction strategy. This is the only strategy that is worthy of you and your future.
So that’s what we teach here at Better Drivers.
By the way, if you don’t choose any of these, you have probably automatically chosen LUCK (do random stuff on the road and hope for the best). The best choice is still #3.