Every day bad drivers cause accidents on the road. Most of the time nobody gets hurt, there’s an insurance claim or two to fix a bent bumper and everyone lives happily ever after. Sometimes it’s a lot worse. Sometimes cars, bikes, and worse, lives are destroyed. So road traffic accidents are a bad thing; to be avoided at all costs. Of course, they’re not always caused by bad driving, but they usually are. And when they are, and someone gets hurt, should the bad drivers responsible be made to retake their test?
Imagine you’re riding down the road, minding your own business and a car pulls out of a junction and knocks you off your bike. Some of you wont have to imagine it, you’ll have been there. Now imagine the same car driver gets in his car the very next day and does exactly the same thing. It’s only a matter of time before he or she does someone some serious damage.
So what do we do? Do we let them keep on driving dangerously until it lands them with a ‘death by dangerous driving’ charge? Or do we say enough is enough after the first accident and make them retake their test?
Beats me…
I’m not sure what the right answer to this is. There are plenty of bad drivers out there that could definitely use some ‘education’ behind the wheel. And there are plenty of driver improvement courses out there that I’m sure they’d benefit from. But you don’t very often hear of them being mandated by the old bill/a court/VOSA or whoever. Sometimes I think they should use their powers to do so, more often.
But then other times, I don’t. Because if someone’s spent 20 years driving without due care and attention, it’s probably going to take more than a two-day course for them to change their ways. In fact, all it’s likely to do is piss them off and make them an even more angrier driver than they were in the first place. And that’s not going to do any of us any favours?
So at what point do we need to make someone retake their test. How bad do drivers need to be before we say they’re too bad? Do we need to wait until they’ve killed someone? Should we be able to nominate our fellow road users for a bit of extra training if we think they need it? Or should we leave it up to the filth to spot the bad drivers amongst us? Answers on the back of a postcard…