South Africa’s K53 learner and driver’s licence test programme has been undermined by government incompetence, leading to the country’s abysmal road accident statistics.
This is according to road safety and driver training expert Rob Handfield-Jones, who recently responded to an article by the Free Market Foundation’s Nicholas Woode-Smith.
In his article, Woode-Smith said that South Africa’s appalling traffic safety record was a clear indication that something is wrong with the way the country issues licences to new drivers.
He, therefore, argued that the K53 standard should be scrapped as “nobody drives or parks the way” the system required.
Not the whole story
Handfield-Jones agreed that South Africa’s system is flawed but took issue with Woode-Smith’s reasoning.
Instead, he argued that the problem with the testing process is that half of the licences are bought, forged, or illegal – something which has been repeatedly proven by the Special Investigating Unit.
“The problem is not K53, but the instructors and examiners who gatekeep the K53 standard, who are solely to blame if the standard is abrogated,” he told MyBroadband.
Handfield-Jones explained that South Africa’s annual road fatality rate began to decline in 1985 and that there was an even steeper drop-off once the K53 standard was introduced in 1990.
This projection held true until licence corruption became dominant in the late 90s, leading to incompetent road users that drove up fatalities.
“The failure of the K53 system began when the South African government neutered the requirement for learner driving instructors to be qualified to a very high standard in 1996,” he said.
“The industry very rapidly transitioned from a collection of top-class professionals whose pupils routinely got first-time passes, to a predomination of chancers whose own driving standards, charitably, are suspect.”
He argued that K53 requires excellent instructors to teach it and that the change led to a flood of poor-quality teachers that have driven up failure rates.
“Before 1996, we could get a test at any testing station with two or three days’ notice. Government broke that, and the price was an epidemic of licensing corruption,” said Handfield-Jones.
The high failure rates then opened the doors for further corruption, this time among students who were looking to get their licences through “other means.”
“It is government’s fault for creating corruption-prone bottlenecks in the bookings system and deprofessionalising the learner driver instructor industry,” said Handfield-Jones.
He also took issue with the common complaint that K53 requires learners to alley dock and parallel park, which is not something people do regularly.
“The method dates from World War II and has been used successfully by hundreds of millions of drivers,” he said.
“It’s so simple that someone who can already drive could learn it from a book.”
However, Handfield-Jones and Woode-Smith were in agreement on two points with regards to the driver’s test.
Both parties believe that the current yard test based on a single session with an instructor should be removed.
Instead, a driver should be issued with a certificate signed by a qualified instructor confirming they had demonstrated parking manoeuvres to the standard set down in the curriculum.
They also argued for a return to the K52 standard for hill starts, which allows for up to 15cm of rolling.
They reasoned that reverse rolling very rarely results in serious accidents or injury to pedestrians, and that the current policy of no rolling is therefore too strict.
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