By: Jim Taylor

The most lethal weapon most Canadians own


Gershwin was wrong. In summertime, the living ain’t easy. Not on the roads, anyway.

        Summertime means that drivers who normally never drive further than Wal-Mart set out on the highway to see the world.

        People who usually drive sub-compact cars get behind the wheel of a recreation vehicle that is only fractionally smaller and more manoeuvrable than the space shuttle.

        Prairie drivers creep around mountain roads.

        Young men in late model muscle cars pass on corners; old men in SUVs change lanes without signalling; some women need more arms than a Hindu goddess to juggle cellphone, lipstick, tour guide, Pekinese lapdog, Tim Horton’s iced cappucino, and steering wheel.

        Summer driving brings out inadequacies that remain hidden the rest of the year.

        Now, everyone knows I don’t like guns. I support gun registry—though not the bureaucratic boondoggle devised by our last federal government—and I would ban handguns for all who lack a good reason for carrying one.

        But in fact, the most lethal weapon the average Canadian will ever wield is not a gun, but a car.



Taken for granted everywhere

Almost everyone today has a car. Even those who don’t own a car—and I actually know a few people who have made that choice—still have a driver’s licence so that they can rent a car if they wish to.

        A driver’s licence has become an almost universal form of personal identification. The U.S. and Canada are even negotiating to accept high-tech drivers’ licences as a substitute for passports.

        This is not about kids street-racing Honda Civics and Mazda 3s. It’s about average drivers who do their best to stay out of trouble.

Because they don’t know how to deal with trouble, when it happens.

        Gun owners at least practice their gun-totin’ skills. They take their weapons apart, clean them, service them, ensure they’re safe. Car owners—well, I suspect that a huge majority only service their vehicles when something breaks.

        I’m appalled at how many cars I see wobbling down the highway with one tire almost flat.

Or hurtling through the night with poorly aimed headlights that illuminate either the sky or the car’s front bumper.

        Theoretically, your local garage will check your brakes, suspension, and other safety components every six months or 8,000 km, whichever comes first, when you go in for your regular oil and filter change. But many don’t.

        And even if they do, a lot can happen in 8,000 kilometres—equivalent to a return trip across the country. Some car owners even try to extend even that service interval to save a few dollars.



Inadequate training

When I started driving, you could get your driver’s licence the day you turned 16. Once you had a licence, there were no restrictions on where you could drive, when you could drive, or how many people you could jam into the car.

        In hindsight, the only thing that saved many of us from self-extinction was that we drove gutless cars on deserted roads.

        B.C.’s current graduated licencing system is an improvement. Accident rates for new drivers have dropped almost 20 per cent.

        A learner’s licence now requires a full year during which a beginner can only drive when accompanied by an adult. A novice licence, the next step, continues to restrict an unskilled driver’s opportunities to get into trouble.

Except, I submit, that a driver needs to experience some of those troubles to know how to get out of them later. I’d be surprised if even one per cent of Canadian drivers have taken skid school training, for example.



Unpracticed skills

   Indeed, most drivers spend their entire lives trying to avoid skids of any kind.

        But no one succeeds in avoiding trouble forever.

        In a skid—on ice, on gravel, on rain-slicked pavement—you don’t have time to think about what your instruction manual said. Any more than a golfer can take time to analyze each muscle movement while swinging, or a basketball player can mentally calculate the trajectory of a shot before taking it.

        Your muscles have to respond, instinctively, long before you have time to think about what to do.

        How can they do that, if they’ve never had any practice?

        A pilot has to practice getting a plane out of a spin. A golfer practices getting out of sand traps. A car driver merely has to demonstrate that he can avoid having an accident under normal conditions.

Neither driver training or driver testing ever pushes the envelope to see how that driver responds in an emergency.

Which is why drivers who mow down a pedestrian, crush a cat, or swerve into the path of an oncoming truck, are always bewildered. They have no idea what they might have done wrong.



Inadequate testing

 I am not recommending that drivers should deliberately test their limits—especially in today’s heavy traffic. That could be suicidal. Even homicidal.

        I am arguing that our training and testing processes need improvement.

        Skid schools can teach some of these skills. Police officers usually undergo skid school and high-speed training. But both can be prohibitively expensive.

        With today’s technology, applicants for new or renewed licences could easily take a virtual driving test, which would expose them to unexpected conditions with no physical risk at all.

        The child who runs out from between parked cars.

The patch of black ice on a corner.

        The oncoming driver who suddenly turns left without signalling.

        Over the last fifty years, the percentage of deaths in car accidents has fallen dramatically, thanks to seat belts, air bags, and technological improvements. But the percentage of people having accidents has barely changed at all.

        In other words, our driving skills have not improved. It’s time they did.

        In an increasingly crowded world, we can not afford incompetence in the handling of the most lethal weapon most of us will ever have in our hands.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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