If you’ve driven anywhere in Hamilton in the last year, you’d notice there seems to be an epidemic of very poor drivers on our roads, making bad decisions and making our city look worse than it already does.
With a whopping 338 accidents or fatal crashes on our Hamilton roads every year, this is unfortunately not an issue of general road safety, but one of driver education and training. With a full licence pass rate of only 48%, you’d expect less people to be on the roads to make bad decisions, but this is not the case. Instead of taking tests in Hamilton, where they will be driving the most, people travel as far as Thames and as close as Morrinsville to avoid having to take a ‘harder’ driving test. Tests should be regionalised to avoid this exact problem- if you are assessed on roads without traffic lights, multiple-laned roads, and speed changes, as well as assessors that are more well-known for being ‘soft’, you have no understanding on how to do these things when they finally come up in real life.
The solution to this, I think, is regionalised testing. This would eliminate the prevalence of unprepared drivers having not learnt to drive in a big city, and mean that testing is more accurate to the area they’ll be in. Or just teach people to drive better. I don’t mind either way, but I’m sick of near-misses every time I drive to uni.
