Should Drivers Be Required to Undergo a Biennial test

[octave]

I am not really convinced by the low IQ accident connection. Most near misses I have had with other vehicles usually involve over confidence, poor decision making, impatience or distraction (the dreaded texting motorist).  I don't believe any of these faults solely occur in people with low IQ but I would be interested to see if there are any correlations.    The driver who overtakes in questionable circumstances is  probably in too much of a hurry or has a sense of entitlement.   I believe the most common accident is running into the back of another vehicle. This is usually is a result of inattention and or tailgating.   Tailgating is usually  a case of an impatient motorist trying to make the car in front go faster.  Impatience is not confined to the low IQ.     Getting a speeding fine for most of us is less willful law breaking and more a case of inattention.

 

31 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I read how "inattention" is a big reason for accidents, but that would correlate strongly with IQ.

I don't really agree with this.   Aviation is full of accidents where an experienced and presumably reasonably intelligent pilot has become distracted or has come to grief due to over confidence.   I have had a few speeding infringements in my time although not lately.   On every occasion I was not willfully breaking the law but rather I was not paying attention perhaps not seeing the new speed sign etc.   i don't think this is because of my IQ.

 

 

 

Sure having a low IQ isn't going to be an asset but I would have thought it would be less important than factors such as arrogance,  adherence to rules etc.

 

Whilst we should always be striving to achieve a zero fatality rate we should also acknowledge the stunning reduction in road deaths over the years.  A stunning statistic is that 2019 1194 people died on Australian roads in 1970 3796 people died on the road, this is despite the fact that there were many many more cars on the road in 2019 than 1970. 

 

Of course the stunning fall in the fatality rate is due to many factors, better cars better roads better medical services and even mobile phones which enable quicker medical attention.

 

I am open minded on the subject of IQ and accidents but I am just not convinced that if we all on this forum admitted how many accidents we had had that we could compile a league table of IQ.    I would think that education and attitude are probably more important than IQ

 

 

 

 

 

[octave]

Just a  couple of points I forgot to put in the previous post.     To the extent that IQ could be a factor in traffic accidents, it is only one factor.    One of the big causes of accidents is still drink/drug driving and I think this problem exist throughout society. Plenty of high flyers get caught dinking and driving.

 

Also men are 4 times more likely to die in a car accident than women.  If IQ is a major factor, what does that say abouts us men?

[spacesailor]

In NZ .

One year they had ZERO fatalities. 

BUT

Those in charge were still unhappy !.

as Revenue was down !.

WHY such a good result.

Everyone  was trying to conserve fuel, with a strike in Australia, no fuel ship left port, ( or something similar  ). 

Odd number license plates got fuel on odd number days,  evens on the even days.

Every one on their best behavior, and happy to be on the road.

spacesailor

[ClintonB]

Decision making needs to be taught. I travel to coast on a New England Hwy to Armidale, across to Ebro, dorrigo, bellingen, to Nambucca regularly (soon to be my commute) I regularly come across people who decide speed signs do not count, double white lines and blind corners are for overtaking. Driving slow vehicles then speeding up whenever there is a chance for others to pass or attempting to pass. The amount of near misses I have seen scares me.I use my speed limiter, have learnt to just sit back and wait. It sometimes can add an hour to trip( with slow horse floats or caravans that don’t understand pulling over won’t change their day) I would much rather arrive than be a statistic.

watching dash cams australia on you tube is educational just to how many idiots are on our roads in this country.

as everyone has said, testing would only see people on best behaviour. Real time monitoring via cars systems and rewarding with lower ctp and or insurance would be a fairer option and more likely productive once people understand it will save money.

 

 

[Marty_d]

1 hour ago, ClintonB said:

Real time monitoring via cars systems and rewarding with lower ctp and or insurance would be a fairer option and more likely productive once people understand it will save money.

 

 

While I like the idea, I can see both limitations and unintended consequences.  If your monitoring ensures that the person stays at or under the speed limit in every zone, then granny who drives around at 40 no matter the limit - never had a crash in 57 years, but caused plenty - is theoretically a safe driver even though she can't see anything but the road right ahead, including the small child who runs out in front of her.   Ditto for the drunk who doesn't speed but has the reaction time of a stoned snail.

On the other hand if you decide that travelling too slow is as bad as going too fast, then you'll get people keeping to the speed limit even though conditions dictate a slower speed.

The trouble is that the road is not a fixed set of parameters which can be plugged into an algorithm.  There's times when going slower than the limit, faster than the limit, or even being on the wrong side of double white lines is absolutely the correct thing to do.

 

[pmccarthy]

Right in the middle of the road is the safe place when there are Roos around

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Many years ago, I worked at a university place where year after year, none of our students killed themselves on the road. This was a statistical improbability of millions to one against.

The revelation came after the powers that be introduced " associate diplomas" for  those too dumb to get into the degree programs. The institute got their fees,and we started to get road deaths.

Now not one of these deaths were officially designated as " caused by low IQ". I doubt that they would have shown up in the bottom 10% anyway.

 

Marty is quite correct to point out that all of us are guilty of driving in a hurry or after a bit of alcohol. He is certainly correct for me. And sometimes we crash, just not as often is my argument.

[red750]

Remember the old adage - better to arrive a little late than dead on time.

[octave]

Her are some interesting statistics.

 

"Road deaths by age group in 2019 show a significant decrease for young persons aged 15-17 (-30%) compared to 2018 and for older people aged 65-74 (-7.9%). All the other age groups experienced an increase in fatalities. The long-term trend, since 2000, is encouraging. All age groups registered a decrease in the number of annual road deaths. The strongest reductions occurred for youths under 20 who collectively registered 274 fewer deaths (-65%) in this time period. The perspective changes slightly for the elderly when changes since 2010 are considered. Between 2010 and 2019 people aged 65-74 saw the number of annual road fatalities rise by 9% while those over 75 saw an uptick of 39%. Despite recent improvements, young people continue to have a mortality rate significantly above the average. In 2019, road mortality rates of 9.0 for 18-20 year-olds and 7.8 for 21-24 year-olds were recorded per 100 000 persons compared to an average of 4.7 for the entire population."

 

https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/australia-road-safety.pdf

 

It is interesting that in most age groups the fatality rate is falling (albeit from a high rate in the young) but there has been a significant increase in the fatality rate in the older drivers.

 

My point is that I don't think we can attribute road fatalities to one cause and that the causes are probably different for different age categories.   In younger age groups there are factors such as lack of experience and bravado. It is recognized that people do not develop an appreciation for risk until their mid 20s.  I recall when I first got my licence I was the first among my peers.  I am a cautious person but still I do remember taking a bunch of friends on a fast drive up and down Yatla Vale road at night.  I was so cool😎 (in my adolescent mind).  Luckily nothing bad happened but this is a situation where  things can go wrong quickly.  If we contrast this with the growing rate of fatalities in the older age groups I am sure different factors would at play.   I doubt that 80 year olds take a car full of their peers for a hoon around.   In the older age groups there are other factors such as eye sight and cognitive decline.   Another factor in this age group may be lack of regular driving experience.

 

I think a key factor in younger age groups is that they are less risk averse, whatever their IQ, not only on the road but in other areas.  I would suspect that more important than IQ (and there is more to intelligence than just IQ) would be attitude and driver education.  Losing control when driving too fast around a bend is an error of judgement, not knowing how to remedy the situation is a matter of driver education and experience.

 

I think most of us would look back at our near misses when we were younger.   We now most likely do not make the same mistakes because we now have fully developed brains that are better at assessing risk vs benefit and we also have a whole lot more experience.  

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Marty is right again but the law doesn't allow for this. The law assumes you to be a retard.

Years ago, an MP for the region was overtaking on the local highway ( speed limit 110km/hr).

He was clocked at 120km/hr, and he went to court saying that he was just doing the safe thing, to minimise his time on the wrong side of the road, while overtaking a 90km/hr car.

He was given a big fine anyway.

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Octave is right too....  the insurance companies used to charge more if you were under 25. Neuroscientists recently discovered that the myelin sheathing on neurons only finishes at 25.

The last bit? the part that processes risk.

So the military likes its soldiers to be under 25. When we had conscription, it was for 20 year-old boys. They obeyed orders without thinking of any danger.

I reckon that evolution favoured this,  would you rather your daughter got pregnant to a member of the hunting pack or not? Their lot would have plenty of mammoth over the winter. The nerds who didn't go might starve.

Alas, what suited stone-ages guys is not appropriate now.

[spacesailor]

INTELIGENCE QUOTATION !.

A university derived formula for grading it,s subjects. 

I have tried to " solve " this conundrum quite a few times & every few years they have changed the format of the GAME.

To some people math,s are an easy subject,  others favour history.or hands on builder,s.

At the ' WORLDS END ' does blue collar or white collar get to eat more survival food.

spacesailor

 

[nomadpete]

10 hours ago, octave said:

Road deaths by age group in 2019 show a significant decrease for young persons aged 15-17 (-30%) compared to 2018

Octave, think laterally. My answer to a cause for that dip....... UBER. My youngest is in her twenties and has a drivers licence, rarely drives herself anywhere. Her peers use UBER a great deal, too. Also, your sources are a bit suspect - the demographic group aged 15 - 17 are too young to hold a driver's licence.

[octave]

15 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Octave, think laterally. My answer to a cause for that dip....... UBER. My youngest is in her twenties and has a drivers licence, rarely drives herself anywhere. Her peers use UBER a great deal, too.

 

Yep totally agree that this is one of the causes of the reduction.  

16 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Also, your sources are a bit suspect - the demographic group aged 15 - 17 are too young to hold a driver's licence.

 

The statistics are for road fatalities, driver and passengers.  The report also includes bicycle and pedestrian deaths.   In  South Australia you can obtain a learners permit at 16 years of age and in the A.C.T. the minimum age for a learners permit is 15 years and 9 months.

 

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Well Spacy, I reckoned that in stone-age times, the blue collars get more food. That is why the girls to this day give the tough guys more sex. Racial memory.

It's not so true these days...  there is a company which specializes in tours to silicon valley so that their client single-women might snag another bill gates before he was taken.

Now bill, in my estimation, was a nerd who would not have done well in the stone age.

[spacesailor]

But !.

If, for whatever reason we have no electricity, all those nerds , that used to be sitting behind desks, will have to use

" pen & paper ". 

If in those unforseen days, to move anything, it would be ' muscle ' power. 

Not " watts " power and if ' rich ' Horse power !.

And, No crypto money.  ( that would be ) . LoL

spacesailor

 

[Marty_d]

In the stone age the "nerd" of the day was the shaman.

He had the only white collar job, by making himself the keeper of mystical knowledge (basically fooling the others into looking after him and feeding him without contributing anything to the tribe).

Plus he was probably first in line for all the girls.

Maybe Bill Gates would have done ok!

[facthunter]

Rush to the Gyms and the steroids lads. Back to basics. Nev

[spacesailor]

Only One lifetime to go from a fledgling electrical system! .

To a " all your eggs in one basket " system, seems to me , as a prelude to disaster. 

Always watching that star going to give us a Big solar flare to knockout our comminication systems.

spacesailor

[nomadpete]

That's a possibility, Spacey.

 

Human evolution has only rewarded short term benefit - so none of our infrastructure is designed to withstand anything more than typical 'once in a hundred years' extreme event. Major solar eruptions, tsunamis, epidemics or asteroid strikes are lower probability than that so we pretend they don't exist. Our selfish selves just quietly say " probably not going to happen in my lifetime so I'm not paying for it" ?

 

My favorite quote from Men in Black......

 

"Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it.

Kay:
A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

Edited July 13, 2022 by nomadpete

[Yenn]

There is one major catastrophy waiting to happen, been predicted for about 50 years as imminent. That is the San Andreas fault ripping apart cities in the USA. I wonder if it will happen, could it be like global warming?

[facthunter]

Experts  warn of it. Personally I wouldn't live in such a place. It's a matter of WHEN.  Nev

[nomadpete]

Yenn,

That kind of thinking has been around since before even Pompei.

[Bruce Tuncks]

I was worried when my daughter lived in a masonry building in San Francisco. Thank goodness she now lives in Melbourne.

That was a great post about how we are impervious to long-range threats, due to the way evolution works.

[onetrack]

I worry about the completely unexpected earthquakes that are liable to be sprung on us.

 

KAPOW! "Oh, that was an entirely new seismic zone, we never even knew about!"  

 

We had a massive earthquake in the Murchison region of W.A. (Meeberrie) in 1941 - one of Australia's biggest earthquakes ever - 6.8 Richter magnitude.

But because the area was so remote and uninhabited, at the worst, a few sheep got a shake-up. There was some serious homestead damage, on a couple of the nearby stations.

It wasn't even felt in the closest towns, because they were hundreds and hundreds of miles away. But imagine an event like that hitting a heavily populated, high rise area, today!