Transition Year driving course misguided, teenagers “just too young to drive”, says newspaper motoring editor

— First responder medic says he’s arrived at mangled cars with young drivers “still holding onto their mobile phone with a frantic friend still on the video call.

A Road Safety Authority rollout of driver training for secondary school children in Transition Year has been questioned because teenagers are “just too young to drive”.

Geraldine Herbert, motoring editor of the Sunday Independent, said that she lives 4km away from the nearest town and has a child going into Transition Year, so she acts as the “resident taxi driver” and is aware of the issues of younger people wanting to drive.

Herbert said: “I think it’s a missed opportunity if we don’t do it as teaching youngsters to be safe road users — I think we should move away from the emphasis on them being drivers. We should look at them understanding the vulnerability of each [type of] road user and the responsibility of car drivers, truck drivers and bus drivers.”

“I also think there’s another issue — teenagers are just too young to drive. There are decades of research on this, that their brains are not fully developed, they are easily distracted, they are often sleep deprived, they are more likely to take risks, and as a result, they are much more vulnerable to collisions. In fact, road traffic collisions are one of the leading causes of deaths of young people worldwide,” she said when being interviewed yesterday on Cork’s 96FM Opinion Line with PJ Coogan.

Herbert said that while giving teenagers safety education as road users in general was a good idea, she didn’t know why we’d be “rushing them into driving”.

“16-year-olds are particularly impressionable, and the minute we start talking about them learning to drive, we give them a totally different perspective of the road. They view it then from behind the wheel, and all other users become secondary,” she said.

She said that younger people often think that they are “invisible” after passing their tests when they think that’s all they need to do. She pointed to Austria, where research has shown a 25% decrease in collisions among young drivers where there was extra education three times after passing their main test.

Presenter PJ Coogan also yesterday interviewed Dr Jason van der Velde, a Cork-based prehospital emergency medic, who described how he’s arrived at collisions with video calls still ongoing and the caller at the other end frantic.

Asked what kind of things he finds at collisions, he said that first responders “obviously experience screens of agony that never be resolved quickly enough”, including people bleeding to death and body parts on the roadside — experiences of “unimaginable horror” which he didn’t want to subject people to.

Van der Velde asked that people did not ask emergency responders to name the worst thing they had seen. He said: “You’re essentially asking us to relive the worst days of our lives too. These incidents carry a profound toll on people’s mental health — they shatter dreams, shatter aspirations.”

He said that a focus on headline death data and a lack of reliable data on injuries is masking that more people are kept alive than previously after serious collisions but often have life-long injuries.

“It’s truly distressing to arrive at a mangled car with a young person who has been seriously injured or worse still holding onto their mobile phone with that frantic friend still on the video call — that PJ is what haunts me,” said van der Velde.

He said that speed, drunk and drug driving, and distracted driving — even with hands-free — are the leading causes of crashes. On the latter point, a large body of research has shown that driving while talking on a hands-free can be just as distracting as talking on a hand-held mobile phone.

On the recent trend of lower seatbelt use, he said that he is attending more collisions where people are being “ejected” from cars.