Is the K53 driving test still relevant? Long-time road safety advocate explains
Road safety advocate Rob Handfield-Jones argues that South Africa should reform the K53 system to better reflect real-world driving conditions, rather than abandoning it entirely.
CapeTalk's Lester Kiewit speaks to Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director of driving.co.za and long-time road safety advocate.
Listen below:
In South Africa, "K53" refers to the standardised driving test, which was first introduced in the 1980s and became the system for obtaining a driver's license.
The K53 includes both a written (learner's test) and a practical driving test aimed at assessing a candidate's knowledge of road rules, road signs, vehicle controls, and ability to demonstrate safe and responsible driving skills in real-world conditions.
However, many road safety experts believe a different approach is required, with some even calling for the K53 to be scrapped.
In response to calls for the system to be scrapped, Handfield-Jones offers a critical perspective on why the K53 may be flawed - but not beyond repair.
Handfield-Jones argues that instead of tossing it out entirely, South Africa should focus on reforming the system to better reflect real-world driving conditions and reduce fatalities on the road.
"If you look at what previous license curriculum was, it was the K52. K52 was very much physical skills... it looked at can you get the vehicle moving and keep it on the road. It didn't really have much of a mental skills component. K53 is more closely based on defensive driving, it took many of those principles and put them in so that there was for the first time an emphasis on thinking skills in terms of just moving the vehicle."
- Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director - driving.co.za
"Part of the large criticisms of K53 over the years has been the lack of updates over the years. The curriculum itself was designed in 1983 so from that point of view, it's 42/43 years out of date."
- Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director - driving.co.za
But, he says, most of what is contained in the K53 is still valid.
"The fundamentals of defensive driving haven't changed much in that time... What has changed are things like traffic law and vehicle technology and that's where the updates are needed but the fundamental core of K53 still consists of things you'd hear on any defensive driving course."
- Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director - driving.co.za
Driving is a set of skills, it's like using any other machine -- to be good at it depends on how well your skillset is, believes Handfield-Jones.
"Confidence and attitude and all these other buzzwords don't come into it... if you have the right skills, you'll be safe, if you don't, you won't."
- Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director - driving.co.za
"What you've got to remember about K53 is that it's entry level, it's designed to take someone who knows nothing about vehicles and bring them up to a standard where they're acceptably safe of the road so by way of that, you have to teach them things that they need to know like how to do a pre-start check but what nobody tells you, and this comes down to the quality of instructors, is that you don't have to do every single point on that check before every drive."
- Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director - driving.co.za
"If you look at the statistics, higher-speed roads are safer because there's less that can go wrong, what we need to worry about is the low-speed crashes in urban crashes because research has shown that the average delta-v in a fatal crash in an urban area is 38.9 kilometers per hour... that's what should be worrying us because those crashes happen so often that the risk of being killed in one is actually quite significant."
- Rob Handfield-Jones, Managing Director - driving.co.za
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