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| Here's me with my course certificate. |
There were many others ... the Highway Code costs £2.50, it would make a good stocking filler for Christmas, 10 new things (on average) are added every year, so if you’ve not read the Highway Code for 10 years, there are 100 things you don’t know that you should know.
One of these new rules concerns warning triangles on the hard shoulder. Advice now is to leave the car and get as far up the bank as possible as soon as possible, don’t walk down the hard shoulder to place a warning triangle - you will be run over.
I’m attending this course because I was caught speeding - 37mph in a 30mph zone on the outskirts of Southwold while on holiday in Suffolk. I had the option of attending a speed awareness workshop (cost £85 and five hours of my time) or face a £60 fine and three points. Having had nine points on my licence at various times during the past decade, I thought it wise to take the course.
There were 21 people in the session (17 men and four women), which is just shy of £1,800 in revenue. Take away £200 for the room, £500 for the trainer and £100 for admin, I’d be very disappointed as a businessman if I couldn’t clear £1,000 profit. All profits, according to the trainer (who was called Tony), go to road safety projects in the county. My course fees are paying for lollipop ladies to see schoolchildren across the road. I hope that they are.
Bill Gates - yes, that Bill Gates, the boss of Microsoft (and no, he wasn’t on the course) - once said that if you couldn’t tell a story in 12 PowerPoint slides then you would lose your audience; Tony must have had well over 100. It was death by PowerPoint! They weren’t even good slides - plain Helvetica on a white background and the same AA DriveTech logo and yellow strip across the bottom of every one. The text was not positioned in a pleasing way, there were no animated transitions and there were several incorrectly placed apostrophes. Tony also had that anathema of good lecturers - a laser pen - he could definitely do with a remedial PowerPoint course ...
He was actually an OK chap and I did feel a little sorry for him. His job must be a bit like a comedian at the dreaded Glasgow Empire - if not a hostile audience, we were a group that resented being there and in a pretty grumpy mood. Tony told me he did about four of these a week - 500 boring PowerPoint slides, he must be able to do it in his sleep and if it was often boring for me, it must be agony for him.
He tried a few jokes to get us on side. The first 10 minutes were spent on Health & Safety issues - fire alarm, fire escape routes, muster points and so on. “We have a designated area for smokers,” said Tony, “it’s called outside.” No-one laughed. “That’s a joke,” said Tony. Still no-one laughed - we were not there to laugh.
Tony’s teaching method included a lot of repeated rhetorical questions, in fact I’ve never heard so many in such a short period of time. His favourite was “does that make sense?” Sometimes he threw in “can you see where I’m going?” or, more concisely, “point taken?” It’s surprising how those little things start to grate after only a short period of time. Does that makes sense?
Tony was a nice chap, but he also had a slightly threatening manner. He kept calling us “you people” and he was obsessed that there might be a ‘mystery shopper’ in the room (clearly the courses are monitored occasionally to assess the standard of teaching, although probably not by anyone with any knowledge of PowerPoint). A simple request to turn off mobile phones took 10 minutes and comprised a lecture about how this hotel conference room was the equivalent of a court of law; about confidentiality, that it was a criminal offence to disclose any information about the course or name people on it (hope no-one’s reading this blog!) and that impersonating another person would result in all your property being confiscated followed by transportation to the colonies. He underlined his point with two anecdotes. I’ll leave you to decide if they’re true or not.
The first occured when Tony had a celebrity on one of his courses (he’s had lords and all kinds of people, he confided, probably breaking his own confidentiality rules in the process). Some joker took a picture on his mobile phone and put it on Facebook; the celebrity’s minders were alerted by the celebrity’s publicity people, the culprit was found and was ejected from the course. There didn’t seem to be anyone worth ‘papping’ on my course unless Madonna has really let herself go. That was the mobile-phone anecdote, by the way.
The other was an impersonating-another-person anecdote. During the coffee break of one of Tony’s courses a chap confided to a fellow offender that he’d been paid to come on someone else’s behalf. “Of couse,” said Tony, it turns out that he was only talking to a very high-ranking police officer in plain clothes (as if she’d be daft enough to come in uniform), who promptly called base and got a couple of officers to come to arrest him. “They didn’t send round a squad car,” Tony recalled, “it was a proper police van, he was handcuffed and shoved in the van. There were big windows right next to the lecture room and everyone saw it. How embarrassing was that?”
The message was clear - if you are attending the course on behalf of another person, keep your trap shut; if you’re sitting next to Simon Cowell don’t give the story to Facebook, sell it to the Sun.
Tony had laboured for 30 minutes with essential messages, warnings, rules and threats before we even got started on speeding and road safety, then we had to sit through a “sponsor’s message” about who organised the course, how lucky we people were to be given this option, why Cambridge Fire & Rescue Service has the word ‘rescue’ inserted in its name (because it had to attend so many road accidents - as if they never rescue people from burning buildings).
When we did get down to the safety aspects, there were a lot of stats and we were all given little handsets so we could vote for what we thought was the right answer, just like ‘ask the audience’ in Who Wants to be a Millionaire? You can play too:
What percentage of people speed in an urban area? Is it:
- 25 per cent?
- 43 per cent?
- 69 per cent?
- 78 per cent?
The correct answer is 3 - 69 per cent.
Some of the facts were interesting, but none were really surprising. I liked the fact that Tony mentioned looking out for motorcycles several times and not in a manner that demonised bikers as reckless people. He also pointed out sensible things such as the thickness of A-pillars in cars these days and the need to look around them.
His advice to keep your car in third gear in a 30mph zone gave him an opportunity to tell everyone that his car had seven gears. No-one asked him what make and model it was and he was clearly keen to tell us. Other advice was somewhat contradictory - look ahead, you should be looking as far ahead as you can see; keep checking your speedometer 31mph is breaking the law. He spoke a lot about tailgaters, which many people who are caught speeding use as mitigation. My family will all recognise the phrase: “there’s someone up me arse!” Well, Tony promised to tell us how to maintain that protective bubble around our cars. It turns out the advice is that when you’re being tailgated, slow down and allow more space in front of you. Touch the brake lights and then brake gently, put your hand over the mirror so you can’t see them gesticulating at you and let them overtake if they want to. I’ll try that next time I have a Polish HGV driver three feet from my rear bumper. I just hope he’s not come non-stop from Warsaw, fuelled by Red Bull and Barocca.
We had been warned about some graphic scenes, but they wouldn’t even have rated a PG certificate. We all know that road accidents are awful and the three that he showed us were extreme examples where speed was a major contributory cause. A youth in a Ford Ka doing about 40 in a 30mph limit had collided with a 14-year-old boy crossing the road in a village. The youth had survived, but was severely brain-damaged - very sad. I would not have been doing 40mph through that village and I’d condemn anyone that did.
Example 2 was in St Neots High Street where a car doing 50 in a 30 limit had hit a girl and her boyfriend on a crossing at 1am on Christmas morning - an extreme example of causing death by dangerous driving. None of us had done anything like that, we’d all crept over the speed limit a little (in my case because it was a wide open, straight road that I’d assumed incorrectly was 40mph). None of us would drive like the idiot that Christmas, but we had to listen to Tony recount the story with (I believe) genuine emotion in his voice.
The final incident was a blind crest with a junction just over the crest. It was a 60mph limit and there were slow signs. A driver doing 60mph had crested the rise and found a car waiting in the road to turn right at the junction. He hit him up the rear and pushed the car into the path of an HGV and the driver was killed. There’s a valuable lesson there - don’t turn your wheel as you come to a rest to help facilitate the turn. That’s what we were taught to do when I learned to drive, but as Tony pointed out there’s really no need now all cars have power steering and if you’re hit from behind when waiting to turn right, you will be pushed into oncoming traffic.
We people were asked if we thought the training had been useful; we all said it had. Tony asked if we thought other drivers should take training, even if they hadn’t been caught speeding. Several people said they should and why didn’t the government make them. I don’t expect to see that in David Cameron’s next manifesto ...
The room was getting quite philosophical. Someone asked how much speeding was down to the fast pace of modern life and Tony agreed that we could do with slowing down in our lives as well as our cars.
It was also getting stupid. When Tony told us we had the highest child casualty rates in Europe (I’m not sure that’s true) someone suggested that children ought to put on a course. Perhaps they should, agreed Tony, clearly thinking of the extra work.
I guess that as I was caught speeding, I did require some retraining, but how effective are these courses? Tony told me that they had not been running long enough in Cambridgeshire to get reliable statistics, but elsewhere people who had attended a course had a re-offending rate of four per cent, which he thought was justification that they were doing a good job. I’ve been driving 42 years and have been caught speeding three times, which is an offending rate of about six per cent. The course was well-intentioned and I think it’s a better idea to retrain people rather than simply fine them and it does no-one any harm to spend some time thinking about our driving skills.
Tony asked us all to think about how we would rate ourselves as drivers and give ourselves a mark out of 10. I gave myself an eight. He then told us he was a professional driver, police trained and his skill level was seven. No-one rated themselves as just average, but that’s exactly what we were. At the end of the session we had to use our ‘Millionaire’ handsets to rate the course and the trainer. I bet Tony rated himself as eight; I gave him an average 5.
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