On the road to insanity

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In our sensible state, we make doctors train for several years and undergo many difficult, challenging and valuable examination procedures in order to be able to call themselves medical professionals. Still more study is required to specialise in emergency medicine to be able saves lives immediately after car accidents -- as well as heal and rehabilitate trauma victims. Other professionals are highly trained to look after these victims for the rest of their lives, which if the doctors are any good, could be as long as 40 or 50 years.

Now, Downundersland is a country home to the world's most rational and sane people. In our country, all these highly trained medical professionals are redundant. That's right, we have sent would-be doctors and nurses off to get a real job: accountancy, perhaps, or law, or the civil service.

You see down here in sensible, smart Downundersland we don't need them because we have put a lot of effort into creating drivers who don't have accidents. Instead of the time-(dis)honoured Australian method of opening a cereal box and plucking out a freshly minted licence to drive a two-tonne metal object like a dodgem at the fairground, we have put our new drivers through years of training and made them pass incredibly complex exams.

They have to understand things such as acceleration, velocity, vectors, friction co-efficients and geometry.

While they are studying they aren't allowed to actually drive, but they can sit in a car with a previously qualified driver and observe, ask questions and sometimes hold the keys right up until the moment of ignition.

Very advanced students near to qualification can actually insert the key and turn on the engine, but only after displaying a thorough knowledge and understanding of the consequences of their action. Of course, the merest hint of inebriation and the student is blackballed for a decade, and anyone found under the influence of narcotics is banned for life.

Well, that's half the story. Now we come to the vehicles themselves. Nothing over three years old is allowed on our roads without completing an annual and very stringent health check to ensure tyres, brakes, steering are in fine fettle.

Drivers too take on courses of continuing professional development every 12 months in order to retain their ticket to drive.

In this operating environment, the number of airbags fitted to vehicles is largely irrelevant, relegated to mindless boast value for lower order drivers rather than actively taking part in protecting victims against their own or someone else's stupidity.

Across the border, in the care-free land of Terra Nullius, the picture is rather different.

Medical professionals receive their licence to practice after answering a short multiple-choice questionnaire and correctly identifying the following implements: scalpel, syringe, swap, suture, cotton balls, and being able to spot the difference between Aspirin caplets and Panadol Forte tablets. They also have to take the most direct route between the OBGYN ward at a major hospital and the Orthopaedic ward without passing the cardiothorasic ward, and they must not break into a run -- even though they are being timed.

Nursing staff are appointed after watching two series of RPA, with promotion to ward sister possible after sufficient ongoing training such as two seasons of ER and one season of Grey's Anatomy.

Unaccountably, the population of Terra Nullius has as low a vehicular injury rate as Downundersland. Scientists engaged by the Caring Roads Authority Protectorate postulate that in the case of Terra Nullius, it is the fear of becoming injured and being placed in the care of such immoderately trained medical staff  that ensures drivers take extra special care at all times behind the wheel. In Downundersland, drivers are so well qualified for the actual task of driving (and not distracted by mobile phones, texting, childish tantrums, alcohol and narcotics) that they too avoid accidents with optimal effectiveness.

When I snap my fingers you will awaken...

Of course, neither scenario exists in whole, just in part. Doctors are highly trained and drivers are not. Drivers have more accidents driving than doctors have operating.

From a technical perspective, the laws of physics cannot be changed (just ask the Enterprise's chief engineer Montgomery ‘Scotty' Scott), so faster, heavier, more powerful vehicles will be more likely to fly off the road and impact large immovable objects causing death or irreversible injuries than slower, lighter, less powerful ones.

The response to the burgeoning power/weight/speed issue is to add better brakes, suspension, steering, crumple zones, and airbags. Latterly ESP, electronic stability systems, have acted like the hand of God to stop a car spinning out of control.

But the questions remain, is it the car or the driver that's out of control and why does this happen in the first place?

In most cases, it is the driver who is out of control. He or she doesn't know what they are doing behind the wheel.

Imagine a brain surgeon operating while plugged into an iPod with Metallica at full noise, or on the phone to his wife arguing about who forgot to feed the dog, or perhaps worse, still three sheets to the wind after a particularly noisy night out with the boys from A&E.

A recent report from MUARC, the Monash University Accident Research Centre suggests that a very large number of serious or fatal accidents have been averted because cars have been fitted with ESP.

The number of accidents that did not happen because of ESP has not been nor can it ever be recorded, but in Otto's humble opinion and experience with ESP and crap roads, too much speed or moronic road users, that number would be extremely large indeed.

So there is an unimpeachable case for ESP in all cars, so long as the right to drive falls out of a cereal box at age 17 or 18.

ESP treats the symptoms not the cause. But so long as gutless state and federal governments refuse to tackle the problem head on, via more realistic, stringent and thorough driver training and testing procedures, the problem won't go away.

Road trauma and death rates are horrific -- so many destroyed families, broken bodies and so much financial hardship. Is it too simplistic to suggest that the motivator for the current political push towards ESP (more here) is aimed at reducing still further the cost of life-long rehabilitation and care for those irrevocably injured by car accidents; whereas previously death would have been quick, if not painless, but certainly cheaper for the state?

ABS and airbags have the potential to commute the death sentence in an accident to life, if you can call it life.

This is very expensive. So if ESP can make the accident less debilitating it's a good thing. Costs to the public purse decline and more can be spent on, well, policing, schools and roads (but, of course, ne'er a cent on driver training).

ESP is a good feature. ABS is a good feature. Airbags too. Crumples zones are good features though they are conspiring to make all cars look identical and ugly at the same time.

This technology is widely available. There can barely be a car produced for sale in Australia that cannot offer ABS, ESP and airbags. That they are not fitted as standard is a cynically economic crime, but so is not properly training drivers before putting the weapon in their hands.

Some governments want to encourage car companies to fit more safety features such as ESP and ABS as standard. Some are waking up to the possibility of future rebates, tax breaks or financial incentives to get customers to buy cars fitted with these safety devices so that when they crash, burn but don't die, their injuries will be cheaper to manage.

If state and federal governments were fair dinkum about safety, the complex Australian Design Rules (some of which are so bizarre and petty to beggar belief) would be revised to include the following:

"No motorised vehicle may be sold in Australia (Downundersland/Terra Nullius -- take your pick) without the following features fitted as standard: Anti-lock Brakes, Electronic Stability Programme and front and side and curtain airbags."

Technically this can be achieved within a short space of time. If your car can't comply, too bad. If it hikes the price of the car too far, well, everyone will be in the same boat, prices will go up and possibly fewer new cars will be sold, for a year or so. Market forces will accommodate the technology, just as power steering, CD players and air-conditioning became standard during the late 1990s. Would you buy a car today lacking power steering, a CD player or aircon?

Governments, as usual are fiddling at the edges, lacking the will or guts to take a bold, rational stand.

This can only be for fear of a ballot box revolution. But is a backlash likely? Driver education is a no brainer for bi-partisan support, as is road safety, and no one has been unseated for imposing the 50km/h urban speed limit or the debatable zero tolerance on speeding (checked the fatality figures lately?), so there's no justification for holding back on a revolution in driver training and road safety.

The upside is more voters left alive and in one piece to thank you and generate tax.

Epilogue: If you lived 100 years ago, chances are you could ride a horse. You didn't just jump on and ride away, you learned how to ride, because it was a damn long way down to the floor if the horse bucked you off. You rode with care and consideration for the horse because if it broke down in the middle of nowhere you were a vulture's lunch.

Horse crashes were almost unknown. You didn't ride very far when drunk. And you watched where you were riding.  Fastest you ever rode was probably 50km/h for a short spurt here and there and never at that speed in the wet or at night.

Most of us are only the third or fourth generation drivers, after what some believe are hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. By what measure of development are we as humans ready for 300hp family cars, when one (or two) horsepower was all our ancestors had to cope with?

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