THE ASSOCIATION OF BRITISH DRIVERS

IN SCOTLAND

 

There were 17 members + 4 others present; including Mike McDonnell, Strathclyde Police Road Safety (Education & Training) Officer.

McDonnell gave a talk on the Education/ Training programme underway under his supervision.

Much of it was positive; not so much around speed enforcement & with more focus on drug/drink-driving and driver attention issues particularly amongst younger road-users (he showed us an excellent video of a Scottish-centred public information road safety advert showing potential effects of driver distraction. This very effective advert has not yet been screened outside Scotland).

He noted that they don't use terrestrial tv to connect with young people as most of them don't watch it at all: they watch satellite channels, play console (mainly) games use the Internet & mobiles. So these are the channels (except satellite channel advertising: too expensive!) that they are trying to exploit to contact young people.

Negative points (in my personal opinion) were that:
(1) He favours a further reduction in BAC level from 80 to 50mg/100ml. This will allegedly save 4 lives a year in Scotland. Pointed out the accompanying risks of criminalising safe "morning after" drivers who were never going to be accident-involved.

Some young people are now apparently masking extensive drug-driving abuses by drinking alcohol to below the legal limit; so they will pass a breathalyser test in the hope of discouraging an officer from taking things further re. their erratic driving in the absence of a positive BAC reading. Presumably in their view this is another reason for wanting a lower BAC : penalising everyone else will ostensibly enable them to more effectively home in on young drug-drivers - or not.

(2) They use the dreaded Steve Stradling (he of the: "Error + Violation = Accident" gross oversimplification)as their "fount of all wisdom" on driver psychology issues. McDonnell (sensibly) interpreted this to mean that there are certain drivers whose driving style predisposes them to increased accident risk. He wants to try to connect with this "target market" to reduce these risks. Unfortunately those who don't fall into this category will also be exposed to the same PRs etc..

I followed up with a brief talk on where the ABD is now, why we had recently restructured, & what issues I saw as being of greatest potential concern to Members. After that the floor was opened to questions, opinions, etc..

The following suggestions & observations were recorded:

Brian Gregory, National Chairman ABD

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