One of the great milestones of progressing towards adulthood is gaining your full driver's licence. Photo / 123rf
One of the great milestones of progressing towards adulthood is gaining your full driver's licence. Photo / 123rf
OPINION
Next week is Road Safety Week, an annual event that involves a whole lot of community groups and organisations who together raise awareness about road safety and promote steps everyone can take to help prevent needless road deaths and injuries. This year’s theme is local road safety heroes — a recognition of local people who go out of their way to promote safer roads and roadsides, driven on by safer vehicles, with safer driver behaviour.
Coincidentally, next week is also identified as Youth Week, a nationwide festival of events organised by young New Zealanders celebrating the talents, passion and success of local young people. This year’s Youth Week theme is, “We may not have it all together, but together we have it all”.
Therein lies a challenge — bringing together two lots of aspirations towards a common goal. How about, “Inspiring young people to aspire to be safer drivers on our roads”.
One of the great milestones of progressing towards adulthood is gaining your full driver’s licence. This allows you to be legal behind the wheel, gives you a sense of independence and freedom, and is recognised as a source of personal identification. Many employers expect employees to have at the very least a restricted driver’s licence, because it is an indication of capability, commitment and achievement. For many young people, gaining their restricted licence is their first real recognised achievement.
The process of gaining a driver’s licence is in three phases. First, the learner licence, which requires study and testing of knowledge against the theory of the road code. The issues of literacy and numeracy, as well as learning difficulties, make this a real challenge for some. Then after 120 hours of supervised driving practice, your driving capability is tested to gain your restricted licence. This allows you to drive unsupervised, but with restrictions. A further driving test is required after a period, to gain your full licence and the ultimate freedom to drive.
It is well recognised that many young Northlanders are significantly disadvantaged in being able to access this process. This could be a lack of appropriate driving tuition or a lack of a suitable vehicle, or lack of parental or other mentoring for the supervised practice, or difficulty gaining access to the testing process. Many people also lack the self-confidence of going through the testing process, and either fail or don’t bother.
Because of these challenges, many young people give up and drive anyway. Sadly, for some young people, their first encounter with the justice system is through a driving offence. The fines and penalties mount up, leading to a downward spiral into criminality.
Over the last couple of years, we have seen a real commitment by a range of agencies in Northland to make it easier and less stressful for people to be able to gain their full driver’s licence. As an example, Ashley Johnston, of Northland Road Safety Trust, manages several contracts and initiatives to assist this process.
She is engaged with three secondary schools who now have driver licensing as part of their curriculum.
Johnston contracts with six community groups to provide driver mentoring. Silver Fern Farms has had a three-year programme that has meant more than 70 of their workers are now legal to drive on the road. Two driving simulators have been purchased to assist educators with driving practice without a car, and a recent initiative has meant the community driver testers will be able to practically test unlicensed drivers in a range of community settings throughout Northland.
The driver licence space in Northland has now got some real community ownership. As testament to that, the following is a narrative from Dargaville Blue Light, one of those community testing groups.
“I arrived at work at 3.30am to find a man asleep on our front steps. He told me his vehicle had broken down and he was unable to return home. I gave him some blankets and he snoozed in our office until 7am. He told me then, that he had held a restricted licence since 2015. I asked him if he wanted to be tested for his full licence with our Blue Light testing officer. He passed his licence by 8.30am, and was truly shocked to realise that, how obtaining his full licence would open up so many more employment opportunities.”
We celebrate these new opportunities for our young and not so young, as part of Road Safety Week next week.
