A three-day ‘Bronze Advanced Driving Course’ for a Fortune-100 corporation in Texas, last week, turned up an excellent variety of roads and circumstances to help us discuss many of the 300-plus safety topics we cover at Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA], in our enhanced-safety curriculum for corporate and professional drivers.
Great confusion was caused by two construction zone trucks displaying “move to the right” arrows, above, when they pulled over across all three lanes to the right-side shoulder and stopped, but made all of those lane changes with the arrows still flashing, so several vehicles followed them! As always, this photo was taken from a totally safe distance, with a long lens. (Copyright image, 2018.)
All of the safety topics touched upon in this post are things which we discuss in detail with existing and prospective clients, initially in respect of fourteen key areas and later in much greater detail.
Despite the opening photograph, above, the weather was deceptively wonderful at the start of the course, but it went from this through heavy rain, to ice warnings, all of which added to the variety of topics and safety issues we could cover. Best-quality driver safety training emphatically can not be adequately covered by briefly teaching just a half-dozen topics — one need only look at high-quality statistical analyses of crashes to realize this. (Copyright image, 2018.)
Pedestrian safety — along with the well-being of all other “vulnerable road users” [VRU] — always features strongly in our various courses, not only because at present a grossly-excessive 6,000 pedestrians are being killed each year on the roads of the USA, often due in part to inadequate safety facilities, but also because as with any at-fault crash, a corporate driver hitting and killing or badly injuring a pedestrian can result in a lawsuit and major financial losses for the corporation, especially if drivers have not been adequately trained for safety.
Approaching Dallas from the south for some driver training work in the busy, downtown area, but naturally we were focussing on the important topics of “lane discipline” and best-practise, safe highway driving in general, on the way there. (Copyright image, 2018.)
One of the most important features in any driver safety training regime is, of course, the depth of training of its instructors. This is something we take very seriously indeed at Advanced Drivers of North America, although we know of competitors who train their instructors for only five days, or even just two days, and that’s from scratch — people who up until that point know nothing about truly safe driving other than what they learned while taking their own driving test, often decades previously.
In a nearby city, all sorts of unsafe things were happening in a school zone as the kids were heading for home. Apart from the driver of the cross-flow sedan, in the foreground clearly not having seen the young lady who was waiting to use the crosswalk, there were other teenagers on the median and jaywalking (see photo), up ahead, and several vehicles made U-turns through gaps in the median. Insufficient crosswalks on the divided highway was a clear safety issue and something that demands a lot of all the drivers in the vicinity. (Copyright image, 2018.)
At ADoNA, even our most experienced instructors are never allowed to guess what the answer to any question might be. Everything we do is research-based whenever that is possible, and failing that it is a combination of global best practices blended appropriately with U.S. safety culture. Neither of those features work well in isolation.
Something that many people see a few times in their life is a straight line between wet and dry on a road, literally where the edge of a rainstorm passed by, but this was the first time I had seen one where the line coincided with a bridge. (Copyright image, 2018.)
The very heavy rain soon threw up some serious spray and yet still people drove far too close, despite the fact that their long-range and even medium-range vision had been obliterated and their braking and stopping distances would now be about doubled from that on a dry road. And many were still tailgating, too! Once again, this photograph was taken from a safe distance using a long lens. (Copyright image, 2018.)As grim as it may be – for which we apologize – this really is what it all boils down to. Did you know, for example, that in less than the last 30 years alone more than one million Americans have been killed in U.S. road crashes? Yes – more than a million in just under 30 years! This poignant white cross was beside one of our DFW-area training routes last week… just one of countless tens of thousands of saddening roadside memorials in the USA. (Copyright image, 2018.) Wherever possible, at ADoNA, we incorporate rural roads into our training sessions. There are multiple reasons for this, which we will happily discuss with potential clients, but one other key point is that more people die on rural roads in the USA than on any other type of road, despite the dramatically lower traffic flows. (Copyright image, 2018.)Last but not least — on a tongue-in-cheek note — don’t forget to watch out for dangerous churches… That is a warning sign, after all! (Copyright image, 2018.)
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At Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA], we attend important road safety conferences in various countries to help keep ourselves as well-informed as possible regarding the latest research and developments in this complex, rapidly-changing field.
New York City very laudably took on the Vision Zero challenge a few years ago and this 2018 event was its fifth annual conference.
Even for the countries with the world’s safest roads, such as long-term, global leaders Sweden and Britain, the Vision Zero goal of having absolutely no deaths each year is a massive challenge, but — as the old saying goes — narrowly missing a difficult target is far better than achieving an easy one.
Welcoming remarks from Lisette Camilo, Commissioner, NYC DCAS
In 2007, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety published an excellent book which since then has been one of our key “go to” resources for valuable guidelines. Its title was: Improving Traffic Safety Culture in the United States — The Journey Forward [See footnote for a relevant excerpt].
There can be no doubt that geographical, political, socio-economic and — importantly — workplace aspects of culture have a major influence on road safety, and this can be seen not only from one country to another but often from region to region within a country.
Equally, there can be no doubt that traffic safety interventions which fail to consider and adapt to relevant aspects of local cultures are commonly doomed to failure.
In the latest edition of what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive international summary of global road safety each year, the mission statement for the USA is: ‘Dedicated to achieving the highest standards of excellence in motor vehicle safety and reducing deaths, injuries and economic losses resulting from motor vehicle crashes.’ However, as the following figures and references will show, this stated goal may be true regarding the intent but actual U.S. outcomes over recent decades have been a very long way indeed from any “highest standards of excellence.”
A fatal road traffic crash (not “accident”) which I encountered by chance during my frequent travel to conduct safe / defensive / advanced driving courses throughout the USA. (Copyright image, 2012.)
Given that at Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA] we teach defensive and advanced driving, the use of assistance features which reduce the tasks and sadly also the concentration of drivers is not a key area for us. (How new safety technology might actually be making our driving worse.)
That aspect, however, is not the theme of this write-up. Instead, I will focus on the Tesla being driven normally, with the minimum of automated features and with maximum smoothness for the chauffeur context plus, of course, maximum regard for driving safely
The Tesla Model S 85 used on an advanced driving “safety and smoothness” course for chauffeurs, looking good in a color that’s close to the famed “British Racing Green”. (Copyright image)
Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA] safe driving courses for chauffeurs are designed not only to maximize the safety of these specialist drivers, for the obvious benefit of their employers or clients, but also to significantly enhance smoothness and finesse (to an extent that always surprises and delights the chauffeurs concerned).
There is much that can inevitably be taught about the safest, smoothest driving on busy highways. (Copyright image.)
Over the past 12 years, Advanced Drivers of North America has carried out driver safety training throughout the Pacific North West, including six cities (each for different corporate clients) in Washington, from the Tri-Cities in the south-east of the state to Bellingham in the north-west, and of course Seattle.
A wonderful view of the city of Seattle, as I flew in on August 12, 2017, and like all cities, the sort of place we can use interesting challenges and instill a much better understanding of safe driving, especially on Advanced Drivers of North America’s “Silver” and “Gold” courses. Copyright image.
The latest “THINK!” advert gives a small but important insight into the proper use of observations when driving.
Far too many drivers simply gaze ahead of their vehicle while driving without actually noticing everything they should and being alert to all the things that potentially could go wrong. Worse than that, many drivers literally do just gaze at the back of the vehicle they are following, reliant on the brake lights of that lead vehicle to trigger a response in themselves. But either way, drivers who do these things are throwing away a lot of safety.
The speed limit sign is not the only thing that needs to be seen when you are driving! This image is from the “THINK!” campaign in Britain but applies in every country.
At ADoNA, we have had the privilege of being quoted and mentioned in newspapers and on news programs around the world, and it’s always a pleasure. On this occasion, however, we have found a Canadian article from three years ago (July 2014), in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, which uses our data to open the piece, and we didn’t even know about it until now.
Advanced Drivers of North America’s CEO Eddie Wren at the United Nations in New York for their General Session on global road safety, April 2012. (Copyright image.)
Presumably quoting from the earlier version of our now completely re-written website, the article starts:
For over ten years, Advanced Drivers of North America [ADoNA] has been teaching the important fact that official “overall stopping distances” for cars have been inaccurate and needed to be treated as being significantly longer than previously thought. Now, at last, our own calculations have been proven appropriate and extremely accurate.
An excellent graphic from Brake showing the old versus new ‘overall stopping distances’ in which each car length represents 13 feet. (New distances shown above old distances, at each speed.)
