Ramming home safety for young drivers with dummy run

Rotary helping save lives of young people on roads

RIGHT PATH: Driving instructor April Seymour at the students' eye-opening RYDA demonstration on stopping distances. Picture: Peter Gardiner

THE school-uniformed figure is first slammed by the braking sedan then skittled outside the House With No Steps property on Fellowship Drive.

Somebody should call the police. No need, because they're just down the road watching from the highway patrol car as the foam crash test dummy does its bit to save the flesh and blood of the young learning drivers.

There's a group of St Andrew's Anglican College students all intently watching on as this most graphic of Rotary Youth Driver Awareness simulations.

At this session, 110 St Andrew's learners have split into groups to run through six interactive workshops, including making the right road choices to survive those potentially lethal early driving years.

Coastwide Driving School instructor Andy Jones is behind the wheel while fellow instructor April Seymour is driving home the message. Ms Seymour asked the students what would happen if this crash test dummy was a real child.

"Because this (dummy) is made of foam, it bounces, but what would a child do?”

The students chorus the answer to that: "It would go under the car”.

They have also run through the actual stopping distances after hitting the brakes at 40km/h, 60km/h and 80km/h.

Seeing is believing, but Mr Jones has an advantage that the average driver caught unawares does not - he knows in advance he has to hit the brakes at a certain spot.

Ms Seymour tells the students this demonstration is partly about the actual physics - about how long a sedan will take to stop once the brakes are applied.

The other crucial split-second factor is the average driver's reaction time, which is 1.5 seconds.

The Department of Transport, which sponsors these eye-opening RYDA courses for Year 11 learner drivers for free, has an online table that spells out the forces at play here.

The department's website calculates a vehicle travelling at 40km/h travels 17m by the time most drivers react and then a further 9m to actually pull up.

In the wet, that 26m stopping distance is 30m.

Ms Seymour said if a young driver is distracted by something in the car or by their phone, the reaction time is far worse.

All the RYDA participants also run through crash investigations and hear the true story of a person severely impacted by road trauma.

Rotary Noosa's Tess Alexandroff said the statistics surrounding young drivers are chilling.

"When you're on your learner's - you are the safest driver in town. The minute you get that licence, all of a sudden you're the most vulnerable,” she said.

"You can't go from a learner to a professional; some think the P-plate stands for professional.”

This is the 10th year of the RYDA program has been running with support from the Bendigo Bank, with an added incentive of one learner driver on the day winning a $100 bank account.

"We are approaching our 5000th student, which will happen next month when Coolum High comes through, which is quite a milestone,” Ms Alexandroff said.

"If they just take something out of this... just something that can save one life.”