New approach to reducing fatalities amongst young novice drivers

[Music: 'Drive My Car', The Beatles]

Robyn Williams: Nearly 50 years ago The Beatles got it wrong. Not only should babies not drive your car, but doing so in a state of distracted passion could even shorten your romance, drastically.

This Science Show on RN is going to be different. It comes from someone at the Academy calls a star of tomorrow, Dr Bridie Scott-Parker who does research on driving and is based at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Her work as a psychologist concentrates on young people, especially males. But what she concludes applies to all of us. Using devices in the car, being trained by amateurs, feeling too safe in your 21st century electronic cocoon is dangerous. Dr Scott-Parker is speaking in Canberra at the Shine Dome for the Australian Academy of Science.

Bridie Scott-Parker: Young drivers, just in case you are not actually aware of the statistics, when we are looking at across Australia, young people make around 30% of the population, but 23% of all the driver fatalities. That's roughly twice the percent that we would actually expect to see just from the population profile.

There's a lot of things that are worse than being killed. You can have a serious spinal injury or a brain injury that can't be repaired. We know about the cost of crashes, where governments are really good at putting numbers…statisticians are always working out how much a life is worth. We can work out a fatal crash costs around $8.5 million. What price do you put on the social cost of that crash?

So here we have our learner. Interestingly enough I'm often asked by the media and parents, they think that this learner phase is the most risky time. The learner phase is actually the most safe time, and that's because the young person is learning how to drive with a qualified supervisor beside them, often mum and dad or a professional instructor. We then have this huge peak, this whole Jekyll and Hyde moment once they get their licence. They drive into the licensing centre reasonably normal, reasonably sane, they get their licence and there's this huge spike, there's this huge peak in the incidence of crashes, fatalities, injuries. And this is what has propelled my focus and my interest in young driver road safety; what's going on here?

Insanity. I'm a psychologist, I love this definition. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Young driver road safety, 60 years ago we knew this was a problem, 50 years ago we knew this was a problem, 40 years ago we knew this was a problem, 30 years ago we knew this was a problem. What have we done? The exact same thing, packaged slightly differently every time, and we are still getting the same results. Time to look forward. Let's look at it a different way.

So a couple of different programs of research I've been in engaged in, nearly a decade of my life. Alarming when you put it in that perspective, but that's okay. So the first part I'm going to talk about is a comprehensive evaluation of the person, the behaviour and the environment. And then the next part is the super-exciting one, and I'll actually be able to share a little bit of research framed within this new Rasmussen's risk management framework.

All you really need to know is that I've spoken with over 2,000 young drivers, they filled in surveys, they've chatted with me in shopping centres. They are so adorable. You walk into the food court of the shopping centres, outside McDonald's, where the movies are, and you hold a $20 note in your hand and you say, 'Darling, would you like to talk to me for 20 minutes for $20?' They all do, they're so cute. And they'll start saying, 'Oh but Bridie, I'm a really safe driver, I never do anything risky on the road,' and the friend will be under the table kicking them going, 'Really? Really?' I love it. You get a group of them together and they dob on each other. It's fantastic.

And I say to them, 'When I got my driver's licence I rode a dinosaur to the police station and then we just did a uey and it was fine, there, ta-dah, I have my licence, I'm so old, what do you do today?' It's fantastic, they share the most extraordinary things.

Okay, so imagine a figure, up the top, behaviour, this side, environment, person, behaviour, okay, young driver research. A lot of the time we look at the person or we look at the behaviour or we look at the environment. Insanity! We're not doing anything, we're not learning anything. These are all interrelated. I looked at all three dimensions.

So let's look at the behaviour. Do you know, in 60 years we have not actually come up with an instrument to measure young driver behaviour? How are we going to know if anything we are doing is having any effect? Do we even know what they are doing on the road? How are we going to intervene? So the first thing I did was come up with a scale. It's got five elements to it, so transient violations, things like speeding, things that can change throughout the journey. Fixed violations, so alcohol and drug use, that's likely to stay stable throughout the journey.

Misjudgement, you're learning, it's normal to make mistakes, it's okay to make errors and exit too fast. A bit freaky if you're doing 100 on a 40k offramp though, we don't like that. Risky exposure, night driving with friends, young people are adorable, I'm old, I don't want to go out at night driving with my friends. I can't tell people how to design countermeasures if I don't know what young people are doing, and night driving with friends is cool when you're 17. I do remember vaguely last century.

And driver mood. Young drivers tell me if they are upset, they have a fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend, they'll get in their car and drive around to cool down. So pre-licensed driving, this means that you are actually in a car in command of a vehicle driving on the road before you even have your learners. You haven't passed a learner theory test, so this is particularly alarming, so you don't know the rules and you don't have a supervisor beside you. 12% of learners across Queensland, over 2,000 learners, 12% of them said they are on the road. Freaking me out. Unsupervised driving of the learner. Again, we want a supervisor in the car, they are playing a really important role. 13% of learners are driving unsupervised.

Interestingly I have heard from many people that they are getting their car as a hand-me-down, mum and dad's old car, the grandparents' car, they might have stopped driving, they'll buy a $500 bomb that dad will do up. 80% of provisional drivers have a car after six months. Really risky. I encourage parents to share the family car. Lots of different reasons, mostly because mum and dad's car is usually a better car, crash avoidance features such as electronic stability control. If they crash, we want curtain airbags, we want them in a five-star anchor. The other part is that young drivers are terrified to go home with mum and dad's car with a great big scrape down the side of it. They are more careful on the road. We want consequences for risky behaviour. If it's their car there is often no consequences for driving like a maniac.

Three-quarters of provisional drivers, they know they are tired, they know they are too tired to be driving but they are still driving. This says that getting to wherever that destination is is more important than pulling over. Huge, huge problem. Young people are busy, often juggling work and school, family, often driving mum and dad to the train, picking up siblings. They're so cute. I remember getting my licence and racing downtown to get a carton of milk and then coming back and going, 'Mum, do you need anything else? A loaf of bread?' Going downtown and getting a loaf of bread. Great! Helpful. Not great when they are tired. You can go to sleep and not even know it. You can drive 500 metres on the highway sound asleep. Think about how much that typography can change in 500 metres.

Speeding. This is interesting. I particularly love this. I can completely understand speeding, a learner speeding by up to 10ks an hour. You're learning how to operate a vehicle, you're going up a hill, you are accelerating, you don't realise you need to hold off on that accelerator because you got all that built-up kinetic energy, you're going down the hill, you're going to accelerate. I completely understand most learners speeding up to 10ks. I have some issues, a third of learners speeding 10 to 20. Having more issues 13% of learners speeding over 20ks an hour, and this suggests a supervisor isn't paying attention to the speedo. We need supervisors to pay attention to what's going on in the car.

Unsurprisingly huge peaks in the speeding proportions when they can drive independently, which does reflect that crash risk. I'll just flag too here that in Queensland we changed our graduated licensing program in 2007, and I was able to compare some figures, I'll come across that shortly.

So, the person. Road safety people are so cute, they forget that we are dealing with teenagers. Do we have some teenagers in the room? No one is going to confess? Yes, aren't you adorable! I have teenagers, you are bonkers, you are just lunatics, and you are meant to be. This is a normal part of being a teenager. You are meant to be emotional, you are meant to test boundaries, you are meant to take risks. This is really important to develop your identity, to go from being a child to that tween, like the Bieber stage (if he ever gets out of that stage), and become an adult. This is normal. We forget that.

It's normal for boys to be particularly risky. You used to be out to go out, kill a bear, I'm a man. What do you do now? You get in the car and hoon around. And younger drivers. Interestingly, I hadn't come across this before in the literature, the pre-licensed driving, so this was before they had their learner licence, and unsupervised driving as a learner, it is people who are in a relationship, and I asked young drivers what was going on, and they are getting mum and dad's car when they don't know and going down to the local creek. I live in a rural area. So that's just interesting, parents who have got teenagers in a romantic relationship, just be aware of where your keys are if there is a local creek.

Okay, for the psychologists, this is all very exciting; sensitivity to punishment. So that regulates your behaviour. If you think you are going to get caught for something, you won't do that behaviour. And that's actually related to anxiety and depression. Sensitivity to rewards. So if you are highly attuned to rewards, which is normal as a teenager, you are always looking for what feels good, that is normal, so is sensation seeking propensity. They are related but they are separate. More risky behaviours reported by drivers who are more anxious, again normal for a teenager to be anxious. Depressed, again, this is a normal part of growing up. Greater sensation seeking propensity and greater sensitivity to reward.

So, the environment. We tend to look at the environment as some great big nebulous thing and we don't actually understand what it is. There is a separate part; structural environment and the social environment. So I'll start with the structural environment. In Queensland we changed our licensing program in 2007. Everywhere you would be hard pressed to find two licensing systems that are the same, whether you are here in Australia or looking in the United States. Even in Canada, I was in Canada last week and every province has its own version as well. In Queensland you can get your learners at 16, you have to hold it for 12 months, then we go on to our provisional licence, you hold that first one, the red…as I say to my children, if you see a young driver with a red P plate, get off the road, red is warning, think redback spider, red-bellied black snake, get away from that. Just as a footnote I'll let you know, my teenage son is never getting his licence. I am a young driver road safety research, he is Evel Knievel. Explained to me at 11 all the hooning he's going to do. Mount Vesuvius. He's not getting his licence. Okay, 40, maybe 40 we'll talk about it, we'll see.

Graduated licensing. So I was able to access some data collected before we changed our licensing program. We never had a minimum practice requirement in the old program when we brought in a minimum practice requirement. In the past on average they were doing around 63 hours, and that has increased to 92. The minimum is 100, but you do get bonus points for doing ours with an instructor. Unsurprisingly mum and dad are doing most of that. Not many people can afford to get 100 hours with a professional instructor.

It's a longer learner period, which from a research perspective is great, it means you are cooked a little more, your brain is more developed, perhaps you've moved on and got a job, got some debt, got children, you are less risky. Interestingly it was easier to get practice, and that was one of the main arguments against bringing in 100 hours of supervised driving; it would be too difficult to get practice. And it seems that parents are going 'we're never going to get rid of this child, let's take a structured approach to the learner phase'.

Interestingly though, and something that's not able to be handled by the current state of the licensing program, most people are getting their hours right before they go for their test. You don't learn tennis this week and enter Wimbledon next week. We want you in the car across that whole 12 months. You feel different, the road changes, I've been driving, I worked it out, horrifyingly, I don't know, 25 years or something, every time I drive I would come across something new. We want the young person exposed to new things all the time, with mum and dad in the car beside them.

In Queensland you have to hand your log book in to the Australia Post office. They send it away to the Transport Department, they audit it for accuracy and completeness, and then you are sent a date for your examination. In the Caboolture area where I live, there was a three-month wait list at one point. If you're not practising in that three-month time, that's a really risky thing to be doing, and we don't want the message too to be 'the only reason you're practising is to fill in the logbook'. No, the only reason you're practising is because we are trying to keep you alive.

There is also a fantastic urban legend about log books not being accurate. The media says to me all the time that, no, they are all completely made up. And I say to young people, well, are they made up? And they said no, they couldn't be stuffed, it is just too hard to sit there and make it up, it's just not worth it. So yay for apathy.

So the social environment, influence of mum and dad. Mum and dad are models; right from the moment that baby car-seat turns around, they are watching everything you are doing. You try hiding a chip packet or an ice cream. Kids see everything. Same as on the road. The way you drive, the way you talk about speed cameras, if you say they are just revenue raisers, they are taking that attitude in.

Interestingly, and I hadn't come across this before, if there's no bad outcomes—so if they were speeding, lost control of the car, did this whole fishtailing thing on the gravel on the verge, but they got the vehicle back under control—there's no consequences, it's fine. Parents are unlikely to say anything, friends are unlikely to say anything. I want mum and dad to say, hey, that's not good. I want the friends to turn around and go, hey, that's not cool. You're that close to having a really, really, really bad outcome.

Unsurprisingly boys are looking up to mum and dad. Boys in particular are tuned into what dad is doing. Boys watch what dad is doing, girls watch what mum is doing. And parents are influential. They think as soon as a child has their licence they don't care anymore. They don't want to confess to you but they still care what you think. It's not cool to say in front of your friends, 'I don't want to do that because my mum and dad wouldn't like that.' You are the little voice inside their brain, they do still want you to be proud and they do still want to do what you think is right, so keep sending consistent messages through that provisional phase.

Okay, police. The other thing I looked at was the influence of police, and there is zero in the literature about this. There are now two articles I've written, and I've got another one in there now. I hadn't come across the concept of punishment avoidance before. Young girls, they are adorable, they are sitting there in McDonald's giving me a demonstration; they can go from zero to outright balling in, like, three seconds, faster than the Porsche can on the highway, it was amazing.

Getting out of speeding tickets. Six times one girl did as a learner, and needless to say she didn't have a supervisor beside her either, that wasn't picked up. As soon as the policeman walked up to the car she burst into tears and got out of the ticket. What's the message she is taking home? She is taking home it's no biggie. The boys suggested they might learn how to cry to try and get out of tickets. I don't think it will work. And the research I found across the state, a quarter of young men are paying attention to where the police are and avoiding those areas. That's really risky because that suggests you're doing something wrong. It suggests you've been drinking and driving or you are speeding, or we have passenger limits.

You are not allowed to carry more than one peer-aged passenger after 11pm at night, and if they've got too many people in the car…I had one young chap in my area had seven kids crammed in the car, drove out of McDonald's at 1 o'clock in the morning down the main road, six-lane highway, and the policeman pulled him over and said, 'You don't have your lights on.' He said, 'Thanks mate,' and he drove off. Seven kids in a five-seater car to start with, breaching the passenger limits, no plates on, no headlights on. There's a whole heap of issues going there. The problem is that he now thinks the police are an absolute joke. He has no respect for any rules, he can do whatever he likes.

Okay, again, if you're interested in theory, I'll just brush over this. This is all very interesting. I got to play with lots and lots of different theories and have marked my stamp on the theories. I don't think the way that it was constructed was right and I've choofed it into the world of young driver road safety, brought it into the 21st century.

Willingness versus intentions. Researchers love to say, 'Do you intend to do this behaviour?' Who is going to turn around and say, 'Yes, I intend to drink drive tomorrow'? You're not going to say 'I intend to drink drive tomorrow'. I have never had a teenager say to me, 'Yes Bridie, I definitely intend to drink drive tomorrow.' They are willing to do it. They will be at a party, something will have happened, the designated driver has had a drink, there is no other way home, they've been drinking, they figure 'I'm going to drive home'.

We need backup plans. You need one get-out-of-jail-free card with mum and dad. Neighbour, aunt, uncle, employer, someone. When you get in a situation where you don't think it's safe for you to drive, either you or to drive with your friend, you need one chance where you can ring up and say, right…you can call someone at 3 o'clock in the morning and get home alive. Yes, you have a little chat the next day but there's no consequences, and you figure out ground rules for options for future. Don't get in that car.

Okay, so what does all that mean? Education, engagement, engineering, incentives, enforcement. We are doing little bits of each of these. Some of them we are doing well, some we are not doing so well. That made me step back and go what's actually going on? I've been in this area at this point for nine years and I just felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall. Researchers tend to write really great research and we publish them in really exciting articles that I bet not a single one of you have read. So what is the point of me doing this research? We need to translate this into something that is actually going to improve young driver road safety.

So I stepped back and said, right, who is actually in the young driver road safety system? It's not just the young driver. Why are we spending all our time focusing on the young driver? We are not making headway. And that led to these next two research projects. Okay, so take notes, there's a test at the end. When we look at aviation, plane crashes, massive investigations, there is engineering solutions, there's policy changes, all sorts of responses. Rasmussen's risk management framework is systems thinking that has been applied in aviation. That's just one area that it has been applied. So we can think about six levels in a system. So let's think about young driver road safety.

In this system the first level is the government. So this is things like your Licensing Department, the Federal Road Safety authorities. When we look at the next level, regulatory bodies, so people who fund research, researchers such as myself, the police who enforce the road rules, local area government…I say to my children; I am the local government of this family. Parents are the local government of their children. Also local councils. Local councils look after the local roads.

Technical and operational management. It sounds very fancy. Complicated way to say things like driving schools, high schools who have road safety units, professional driving instructors, app manufacturers, car manufacturers. Then we get down to the young driver themselves at level 5, and their psychosocial influences, so passengers on the road, other car drivers. And then the equipment and surroundings; what are they driving in, what are they driving on? I know one particular section of the Bruce Highway that I drive on every day I drive to work, I play Frogger, hunt for the pothole, try and avoid the pothole. You're not paying attention to what other people are doing.

So, really complicated, it's very pretty…I stepped back and said, right, I've done all this research, I've read all this literature, what does it actually mean? We use those six levels and we can see contributing factors to young driver crashes. This can flag where we intervene. So the next thing I thought, right, we've got all these assorted interventions, we can see up the top, Transport and Main Roads came up with graduating licensing, general road rules which young drivers also have to follow, all the way down to things like the in-vehicle technologies, speed limiters, alcohol ignition interlocks. And there's a complicated relationship amongst these as well.

So, actors, stakeholders, groups, bodies; who is important in young driver road safety? We need to map these across the young driver system. No one has actually done this to me before, and it was just one of those moments where you just go, well, why not, why hasn't this been done before? You cannot get this information anywhere. Who is in young driver road safety? If you are a parent wanting to do the best with your child, what would you do? Where would you go? No one has any idea.

So based on all my research that I had done, I came up with this figure. So I figured at this point, I'll duck back, it would be great to chat to these people and say, hey, where do you see young driver road safety, how do you fit into this system, who do you interact with and in what way? The important thing here, we need actors at the top to be talking to the actors down the bottom, and we need people at the bottom to be communicating with people at the top. That's a process called vertical integration. That's the only way to maintain safety. Clearly we are not having that now or we would have a safe young driver road safety system.

We also want communication across the levels. So if we look at, for example, level 2, the regulatory bodies and associations, we want the researchers talking to the police and we want the police talking to the researchers. We don't want one-way communication going on. So I figured it would be a great idea to talk to these people. I contacted many, many organisations and I had 42 people agree to have a chat to me. So this is what…from nine years of research and reading and chatting to people, this is what I had after chatting to those 25 different groups, I ended up with something different and I'm an expert in this area and I only came up with that. How can anyone figure out what's going on in young driver road safety? We can't even map what's going on. So this is the first thing. At least now I've got everyone identified, this is a really important first step.

This is just a little snapshot. I spoke to parents and said who are you talking to, who is helping you as a parent of a learner or a parent of a P plater? Sometimes they are talking to other parents, they are not talking to other family members. This is a family issue, this is a community issue. If you are a parent, reach out to the other members in your family, get them on the same road safety page. It's the same with my kids. My parents pay my son for an A. I didn't get paid for an A, just a mention there. But we are on the same page; he works for money, great, they found his button.

Parents aren't interacting with schools. They have no idea what the road safety programs are at schools. The professional instructors, they are not interacting with the professional instructors, and you are on the same page. Instructors keep telling me they pick up the child, drop the child off and say to the parents, 'This is what we practised today, this is what they need to practice over the next week before they come for the next lesson.' And they are finding it really difficult to engage with parents and get on that same page.

So we want vertical integration and we want horizontal integration. We need to communicate. And funnily enough we keep forgetting; who are we actually talking about? We are talking about young drivers. Have we given them a chance to actually say anything? I'm pretty sure that we haven't. In Queensland we changed the licensing program in 2007, we had a stack of community forums in 2005 and 2006 where people got to come along and yell really loudly, saying no we are not doing this, yes we are doing this. It was alarming, it was almost fisticuffs. Young people didn't get a voice in that.

Since we changed the licensing program, again they haven't had a voice. How are they going, what do they think of this, what do they need to, what do they think will help them be safe, what would they tell other learners? So I went to two local high schools, I had 37 learners and 34 provisional drivers and ran separate groups just for learners, just for P platers, saying, what's going on, what do you need, what advice would you tell others?

If you are analytically minded, I did a thematic content analysis, a lot of fun. It basically means I just got everything they said and put it all together into a story. So the main issues, there were two key issues, one was learning to drive, and the other one was supervision. So if we look at learning to drive, during lessons, particularly that first lesson, let's have a look; 'the first time I went on the road and it was a bit of a disaster…' Oh, just a warning, every second word is 'like', I don't know why, it's a teenage thing. '…and I ran, like, three red lights because I just couldn't look at everything and concentrate on what I was doing.'

I had another young girl who ran a red light, and her father made her reverse back through that red light. It was not her time to go through the intersection. Could you imagine if you were driving through that intersection and saw the learner doing this backwards through the intersection, freaking me out. Don't do that. If your learner goes through the red light, thank the lord you weren't killed, and pull over on the side of the road and say, 'Darling, please don't do that again.' Roundabouts are also particularly tricky. Don't take your learner on a roundabout in the first lesson. If you take away one message today, take away that one.

Vehicle logistics, the correct controls, putting petrol in, crashing. I put the brakes on instead of the accelerator. This is all very funny. This is in the middle of the road. You're going to have a learner in front of you suddenly slam the brakes on instead of driving through the intersection. Interacting with other road users. And perhaps as other road users we don't realise how freaky it is that we drive close to learners. We don't indicate, we make mistakes too, and that really rattles a learner.

Tailgating is a huge issue. 'Tailgating, even my dad gets frustrated as well. Like the other day he's, like, I'm ready to get out and tell them there's an L for a reason.' Keep away from learners. Don't cut them off, and don't tailgate them. Be smart. When you are learning to do something, what do you do? You make mistakes, it is normal for them to make mistakes. Do you want to be involved in that mistake? No. Give them extra room. Think about it. Instead of learners feel like other drivers are teaching them a lesson. You are doing 60 in the 60 zone, I'm going to sit right on you and teach you a lesson for complying with the speed limit. We are not there to teach them lessons.

Okay, next category, supervision. So the two groups of supervisors, commonly parents and instructors, so the quote…this is adorable, I'll walk this way…in Queensland there is rampant stomping, mum stomps the floor and her son says, 'I'll be, like, there's no pedal there Mum.' And he thinks it's hysterical and the mother is screaming with her foot stomping the floor.

Graduated licensing. They had lots of thoughts about graduated licensing. Generally they thought it was a great idea. In Queensland you can't have the mobile phone on any loudspeaker function, whether you are a passenger, the driver, no mobile phone loudspeaker function at all. And this one young chap, the car had Bluetooth so it automatically came on. I had to turn mine off because it automatically picks up, and I was like, what? And I freaked out because this thing started yelling at me. So he's in a newer car which is great, protective, but he wasn't aware that the Bluetooth would suddenly kick in.

So provisional drivers, a whole different set of issues and advice coming from provisional drivers. One of the key themes was psychosocial independence. That's what I was saying before; oh Mum, I'll go downtown and get the carton of milk, I'll go downtown and get the bread. It's a huge step, it's a great big part of becoming an adult. One of the quotes…it's tricky though, some parents don't want to let go. Yay, don't let go. One young girl was complaining; 'Dad will still tell us…I'm, like, dad I have my Ps, and he's, like, telling me what to do like I'm on my learners.'

And another mum was screaming at her son, 'I don't know why you've got your licence, I don't know how you've got your licence, you're going to kill us.' That rattles them, funnily enough, that would rattle me too.

Transportation independence, a huge issue, particularly in my area, it's a rural area, so independent transportation is a huge issue. You don't have to wait for mum to get home. The main impetus to get a licence.

Driving logistics, owning a vehicle, purchasing the vehicle, operating costs, a lot of these are a huge, huge shock. Learners before they get their licence actually have no idea how much things are going to cost down the track. One young man is quite clever; 'I only share with mum and dad if I don't have petrol. They think I put petrol back in, ha ha.' He's figured out the system, mum and dad haven't clued on. They might.

We have a practical hazard perception test as well in between our provisional one and our provisional two. I don't know if you have the hazard perception test down here. Basically you can sit at home in a luxury of your own computer and you just need to watch this computer program and click wherever you think a hazard is. And there's this very complex algorithm that figures out whether you identified the hazard and how fast you were. I have issues with it but that's separate, that's another discussion.

It was interesting to see how they cope with it. All you do is click as fast, so they are just sitting there frantically clicking like maniacs, clicking every possible thing and they are passing. It's not actually a hazard. If you see a hazard…so when we are driving we never thought that was a hazard. So that's a separate issue for me, that's a personal…that will be another stage of research, I'll change that. I don't know what the benefit is of sitting there clicking like a maniac, you are not learning anything.

Interacting with other drivers, again. Provisional drivers in particular that stated 'I found that I focus on what other people are doing more than on what I was doing,' which is really interesting, they actually realise other people are out there on the road for a change. And you've really got to pay attention. Driving mistakes, as I said before, they are novices. You need around three to five years of independent driving experience before you actually become an experienced driver. So that's a long time to be driving by yourself.

'I've lost all my points.' This boy was adorable. He was sitting in the group beside his friend who egged him on in here, and he's sitting there whacking him like this the whole time. 'I've lost all my points. I was speeding to the university. Me a mate, we were going down, and this one asked me how fast I could go.' So what did he do? He saw how fast he could go, and Mr Policeman saw how fast he could go. They get four points, it all went in one hit.

Okay, I'm always asked what is the one easy fix to improve young driver road safety. There is no one easy fix to improve young driver road safety. Yes there is; don't drive. That's not an option. So what do we do instead, how do we move forward? So we need the information about the individual, their behaviour and their environment. So I've uncovered a stack of really important information that can help us improve young driver road safety.

We need information about the system in general. Up until now lots of people have just gone it's too hard and stepped back. That's actually a red flag to me, as my aunt who is in the audience can attest. As soon as something is too hard, that's it, that's what I've got to do. We need this information about the system. I thought I had it figured out. I'd been in this area, at that point, for nine years, and I thought, yes, I knew it all, I was going to be able to do it. We need perspectives of the actors in the system, so that was when I spoke to the various groups, and the young drivers in particular. So when we look at that huge complex system, does everyone need to interact? What is the ideal system. I still don't know that yet. That will be the next stages of research.

And I just wanted to quickly flag a project in progress at the moment, something I've called Program Gamma. I'm trying to integrate actors across the various levels to achieve systemic change. If we can get some communication so we get our vertical integration and some horizontal integration in one small part of the system, I think that's going to lead to a larger more effective system, and gradually there will be that ripple-on effect. Everyone will be converted to the dark side of improving young driver road safety, and we will be able to actually have an improvement in young driver road safety in the longer term.

Any questions?

[Music: 'Get Your Hand Off It', NSW road safety campaign]

Robyn Williams: We are at the Australian Academy of Science with Dr Bridie Scott-Parker, dubbed by the Academy as a star of tomorrow. She is with the University of the Sunshine Coast doing research here and abroad on driving, crashes and young people. That music, by the way, comes from an official road safety promo, and you are being asked to keep your hand off your device as you drive.

Now it's time for Q&A.

Bridie, there's one thing I do for driving which is very simple; I don't go in for, say, with drink driving, can I calculate how many drinks, I just don't drink when I drive, ever.

Bridie Scott-Parker: Excellent.

Robyn Williams: Similarly it seems to me that if you are a young person, what if you simply do not use any of those technologies? You know, if you look out of the window you see every single young person walking down the street is doing things with their thumbs, looking down, and they do that in the car as well. What if you were to say simply; no technology in the car ever?

Bridie Scott-Parker: I recommend to my young drivers they put the phone in the boot. Lots of them put it in the glovebox. What happens when there is a beep and you lean over to get it out of the glovebox? What do you do with your hand if you are leaning over to the left? Your hand does this. Are you staying on the road? No. The same as if you put it on the back seat. I had a young driver explain it to me he had the sweats because he had put the phone on the back seat. He just couldn't cope. I don't think it's a sweat-worthy thing, but I'm old. It's okay, you can turn it off, you will not die, turn it off.

Robyn Williams: We have a question here, please.

Audience member: What's the impact of advanced driver training with young people? Does it mean that they slow down, they drive more carefully, or does it mean they feel a bit cocky and therefore drive in a more risky manner?

Bridie Scott-Parker: That's exactly right, it's very complex, everyone says they just need more education. So just from the prospective of education, I'm sure we are all aware that smoking is associated with lung cancer, but if we surveyed the room there would be smokers in the room. So education, which is often part of these defensive driving programs, isn't enough.

We've had research conducted in European countries that has showed young drivers who do defensive driving courses are actually more risky. And that's for a couple of different reasons. They accept narrower gaps because they have now done the course, the 12-hour course, the one-day course, the four-hour course, whatever it is, they now know they are experts at it, because they can accept a narrower gap, they will follow more closely, they will turn right in smaller gaps, they will overtake in smaller gaps. And that's associated with much greater crash risk.

The other part, if you are learning to play tennis, you need to practice consistently to maintain those skills. Driving is exactly the same. If you are learning complex manoeuvres on the road, you need to keep practising those or you have a decay in your skills. You don't retain those skills, you don't learn one thing one time and then you are an expert in that. Having said that, I don't want them practising activating their ABS. That's bad, you don't want your ABS to activate.

I actually participated in a defensive driving course as a mum. My daughter is 15 and I said I wanted to come along and see what sorts of things they were teaching, and it was a fantastic exercise for me to step back. The young guys thought it was fantastic. We had water on the roadway, they went like maniacs, fishtailing, getting the ABS on, and said 'that's great, let's do that again'. That is completely the opposite effect that we want to have. Excellent question, thank you.

Robyn Williams: Question here.

Audience member: Bridie, you mentioned the rates of accidents of learners were significantly lower in the first year of P plates. You also stated that there should be more chance to practice under all conditions. A lot of this…how do you feel about putting lower (ie: 80 kilometre an hour) speed limits on L platers, as is done in New South Wales, and the ACT was changed to that in line with New South Wales as this leads to decreased driving time and also the ability to practice in all situations such as passing on country roads and generally passing on the highway.

Bridie Scott-Parker: Thank you. It's very complicated. In Queensland we don't have any reduced limits for the learners, and I would have difficulty advocating for that. They are going to be driving on the road at those speeds. There's a couple of issues. One of the issues is learners say that they are being tailgated and cut off because they are peeing off the drivers behind them. If you've got a learner that is being forced to do 80 in a 100 zone and there's no opportunity for someone sitting behind them…I live in the real world, good grief, they are going to tailgate them and they going to cut them off. Super, super risky.

If we are having learners then go to a licensed driving in situation they haven't driven in before too, freaking me out. I want learners out there driving to parties at 2 o'clock in the morning. They're going to drive to parties at 2 o'clock in the morning when they have their P plate licence. They need to be driving to parties at 2 o'clock in the morning with drunk friends passed out in the back seat, mum and dad in the front seat saying, okay, reduced visibility at night, negative influences in the back seat, possibly pulled over for an RBT, you're tired, you've got places to go tomorrow, you've got things to do tomorrow, you might be in a crappy mood from something that happened today. That's more important than having a learner on an 80k limit in a 100 zone. Thank you for your question.

Robyn Williams: One over there.

Audience member: Speaking as a relatively young person, I would say there are certain negative aspects from the vertical link of responsibility. I think at times certain members of the law enforcement take arbitrary definitions of laws as a sort of egotistical rush. They almost enjoy the kick out of seeing young people and feeling like they have this obligation to enforce laws which in certain situations I feel they could deal with the situation in a more calm manner so that certain members of my age group don't feel almost a desire for egotistical rebellion. Would you agree?

Bridie Scott-Parker: I have had that, particularly for young man there is a perception of the persecution because you've got this great big target, they feel like they have a target on the car. They'll be pulled over on their way home from work at 2 o'clock in the morning in an RBT, and they'll end up being there for an hour on the side of the road having a machinery, they feel that that is completely unjustified, and I am sympathetic to that situation. It's very tricky, however, though because if we look at the statistics, three-quarters of the young people who are killed are young males. So it's a very complicated web. But certainly it should be no ego involved in the decision at all, it's about keeping people safe on the road.

Robyn Williams: Bridie, given the figures, and I saw some of the projection of deaths, it was actually a health survey, cause of deaths in 2025, number three was cars.

Bridie Scott-Parker: It's extraordinary…

Robyn Williams: Now, what if you were to say, if you are suddenly in charge tomorrow, that young men can't drive until they are 25?

Bridie Scott-Parker: Well, my son is not driving at least until he's 40, so…

Robyn Williams: I heard, that's why I asked.

Bridie Scott-Parker: It's going to be Driving Miss Daisy in reverse, I'll be the little 90-year-old in the front driving him and his wife and his children…

Robyn Williams: That law would save hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives.

Bridie Scott-Parker: It would.

Robyn Williams: Is it feasible?

Bridie Scott-Parker: It's not feasible and no politician will commit political suicide over it. Certainly there's support for the argument of young men not being able to drive until 25. We need to provide alternative transportation options, and there's just nothing like that in Australia. It's not all young men either, it's just statistically it is young men. There are some sane young men out there. Yay!

Audience member: My question relates very much to that, I heard a very interesting program on the radio, possibly Robyn remembers it, a very impassioned guy said that he had been looking at brain scans and could predict with a fair degree of likelihood which young men were likely to have accidents. Has that developed, that sort of line of thinking?

Bridie Scott-Parker: It's a new way of moving forward and that's something I mentioned about the technology before, we are just in a new era, it's fantastic we've got these capabilities. Logistically I don't know how we would scan every single person to put them through that machine. Certainly we've got sensation seeking young women. Girls are trying their best to catch up with boys in all sorts of things—binge drinking alcohol—just the same on the road. It's disappointing. Let's convert boys back the good way rather than the girls going the risky way.

We know when we are looking at the brain there's all different parts that are involved in decision-making, regulating behaviour, tuning in to punishments, tuning in to rewards. It's an interesting approach but I don't know logistically it's something we would be able to do.

Audience member: Hi Bridie, AJ Henry, president of the Porsche Club. Thanks to the Academy for hosting us tonight. A quick comment on the question about advanced driver training and then a two-part question. In terms of car control versus road safety, my cut-through example is always Craig Lowndes. He can slide a V8 supercar around Phillip Island at over 160 kilometres an hour, but he has had a rear-end crash on the road. So there's no link necessarily between car control and road safety. The two-part question; first of all, on re-renders, have you got a stat on whether they are the most common form of crash, because that's what I've heard…

Bridie Scott-Parker: They are indeed. In Queensland…I know in Queensland over 45% of crashes are rear-end crashes.

Audience member: Yes. And secondly…which is why the fact that there is no enforcement action taken on tailgating is so frustrating. But secondly, what do you think, is there any cut-through in the road safety messages that we see on our television screens, that those advertising campaigns, do they cut through to adults and do they cut through to children?

Bridie Scott-Parker: That's a good question. I would argue that the scare campaigns that they use on TV connect with the people who are already good, who already aren't risky and who become more…often with the young girls they become more scared and then they become more risky drivers because they are more timid, and you can't tell whether they are going to break or accelerate, whether they are going to go on the roundabout or they are not going to go on the roundabout. That person then becomes more risky. They are trying to be more safe, but they're actually ending up being more risky.

Older drivers, it's tricky, we've been on the road forever. You can speed 3,000 times and not be caught. You can speed 3,000 times and not crash. So what do you learn from that? You learned that speeding is safe and there's no consequences. The trick is with young people, the reason I'm concerned about a young person speeding is because they are not experienced on the road. And as you pointed out, a really interesting thing, people often confuse, and I know young drivers have said it to me as well, operating a vehicle is not driving. Driving is playing dodgem cars without anyone else actually hitting you.

Operating a vehicle, they had that example on Sunrise, the morning television show last year, where the dogs could turn the steering wheel and turn the indicator on. It's not hard to operate a vehicle. Six hours at the most you'd be able to operate one. That's not driving. Driving is being able to read yourself and getting from A to B in one piece while you can read everyone else in the environment that's out there. Thanks for the question.

Audience member: Bridie, I just wondered, you talked a lot about the role of parents and that parents do a lot of the supervising. Do you advocate some kind of training course or certificate or qualification for parents to do that?

Bridie Scott-Parker: This is another research project I launched last week while I was in Canada, and I'm hoping to revolutionise young driver road safety. It's not fair to turn around on parents and say, here, you teach them how to drive, and we don't actually tell them how to teach, what to teach, we just tell them to get 100 hours. What does that mean? So they are driving them back and forth to school because they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, it's a really great way to clock up hours. And I say to them, 'But where are they going to drive by themselves?' Oh, they'll be going to parties, they'll be driving home from work at 2 o'clock in the morning. That is where you should be driving. We are not supporting parents, and that's one of the areas that I'm working on now, and I hope to come back in the future and share the really exciting findings about that.

It's interesting too, we forget there's a pre-existing relationship with that little creature that's in the seat beside you. And you are not always best friends, teenagers are complicated, and parents get tired and cranky as well. So you've got that pre-existing relationship before you get in the car, and maybe you've said to your child 400 times, 'Go make your bed,' and they haven't, and then you get in the car and go for a drive, so you've got this pre-existing tension, and then you are telling them, 'Slow down,' and then the child is going, 'I'm not slowing down, I'm not speeding.' So you've got that pre-existing relationship as well. We don't give parents any tips how to survive that minefield, and I think that's a serious problem. Thank you.

Audience member: I have two questions, but I think you've half-answered one. Horror ads; do you see them as good or bad? And secondly, motorcycles versus motorcars…

Bridie Scott-Parker: [Gasp] What do you reckon?

Audience member: Are your learner and P statistics the same, different?

Bridie Scott-Parker: Exactly the same because it's a novice issue, so it's learning to drive. The problem with motorcycles, I hear young drivers saying, 'I'm going to get my motorcycle licence,' and I say, 'Oh God, please don't.' At least if you're in a car you've got some metal around you that's going to stop between you and the next vehicle. You've got seat belts, you've got air bags, you've got electronic stability control. Deglove is pretty. Ask a teenager what deglove means. It sounds so romantic, you get a bunch of flowers or something. All of this, inside out, off your body. It's not pretty. So I don't advocate they get a motorcycle licence. But it's the exact same issue.

Horror…who looks at that, who connects with that ad? If we are going to be doing advertisements, point out options. Like the young driver when they are out, they've had a drink, when you have alcohol it changes the way you think, and you think it's no big deal to drive. You might think that person wasn't cute when you were sober, suddenly they are cute. You weren't going to fight some complete stranger when you were sober, and you've had a drink, maybe you are going to fight that complete stranger. We need to give them options in situations, don't just scare them to death, it's not connecting. Give them options, say to them, right, if you get in this situation, hey, here are some different options. Before they get in the situation, not when they are already in it.

Audience member: Hi Bridie, Kerry Fitzgerald, NRMA ACT Road Safety Trust. A couple of things. A gentleman mentioned before about some ego and attitude from the police. I've worked with recidivist drink drivers quite a bit and the police are doing their job and they are the ones that clean up after the accidents and have to go and tell families that their child has died. So I'd give them a break.

Secondly, just a comment on your mentioning about the 100 hours of the teenagers, for my sins I had three teenage daughters on their Ls at the same time, and so guess what I did for my whole life for about a year and a half? The trouble of having twins and then another one close together. And what I did, even though I worked in road safety at the time, is I went and had a driving lesson, just to make sure my skills were okay, and thankfully they were because that would have been embarrassing. But I do recommend that.

The other thing that…it's an older publication, but as part of the Australasian College of Road Safety, which is a members organisation of road safety professionals, we put out a publication a long time ago called Surviving Your Teenager's Learner Permit, and it's a really good publication. It's very little and it just gives you useful tips about how to survive it. Because the media campaign we did around it was, you survived the birth, you survived the first year in high school, you survived the first day at school, and now how to survive your teenager's learner's permit. So I recommend that too.

Bridie Scott-Parker: Thank you for that. In Queensland parents and learners get various resources, and they are adorable, I say to them, 'Have you ever read them?' 'No. Why do we want to read them? We want to go drive.' And I say to parents, 'Have you read them?' 'No.' So that's another part, another research project down the track.

In this day and age, giving a child a book, a teenager a book, is not the most effective way to communicate. I did have one adorable young man explain to me, now, if it was a girl in a bikini that gave him the book, he might read it. I don't know if Transport and Main Roads are going to take that suggestion on. But we need to look at the way we are communicating with young people too. These are really important messages that are in them, but if they are not accessing the resources and then they are not retaining the information they are finding out in those resources, that's a huge gap as well.

Robyn Williams: Final question over here.

Audience member: Bridie, have you done any research as to whether the rotary driver training courses are effective?

Bridie Scott-Parker: I haven't specifically looked at that. And it's tricky because even though it's organised by Rotary, every one is slightly different and then only taken up by schools on different years if they can get funding. I know in the Queensland area in our Sunshine Coast region, some of the schools will run it one year, not have it for three years, then run it for another year. I haven't specifically looked at that program. And that's something that I'm looking at down the track as well.

Robyn Williams: When you think about it, you've got all those hundreds of millions of people, all of them amateurs, driving equipment that is changing all the time, with all those controls and with all those bits of machinery outside tracking you, that you've got to pay attention to, while looking at the road. It's astounding we are not actually gridlocked and hopeless all the time, isn't it.

Bridie Scott-Parker: And it gets back to that question; why aren't they crashing more often? We should be crashing more than we are. So yay, we're not!

Robyn Williams: So thank you for talking to us, and thank you for keeping more of us alive. Would you please congratulate Bridie Scott-Parker?

[Applause]

That was in Canberra at the Australian Academy of Science with Dr Bridie Scott-Parker, a senior researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Links to her work on the Science Show website.

Next time, another brilliant lively woman whose brain was bigger than LA, Hedy Lamarr, film star, icon, and an electronic engineer who changed how we communicate in war and peace. That's in two weeks.

Production by David Fisher and Charlie McCune. I'm Robyn Williams, and here is that not really obscene official safety clip. Worth seeing. There's a link on our webpage.

[Music: 'Get Your Hand Off It', NSW road safety campaign]