Diary Of An ADI

This is an interesting story from The Bolton News.

A 90 year old driver, Thomas Clark, has been banned from driving after he pulled out of a junction and seriously injured a cyclist.

His defence lawyer argues that he has never been involved in an accident before, and he relies on driving to get around and help a housebound 85 year old friend.

However, the housebound friend lives 55 miles away – and Clark has also pleaded guilty to driving with defective eyesight!

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they can’t do what they used to be able to do.

Driving is one of them.

I’ve recently mentioned several situations where one of the following is true:

• start petition because test centre is scheduled to close
• start petition because scheduled test centre closure has now happened
• start petition because test centre closed down several years ago, and since one of the others appeared to get somewhere, we might too
• there is no real evidence that the test centre is closing, but we haven’t got much on so let’s start a petition anyway

Now there’s another one up in Cumbria (perilously close to Scotland, where a lot of the other unrest seems to be centred). Please note an updated story from the same source, which quotes the same instructors saying the same things – but which also adds something from the DSA.

The story here appears to be that the Theory Test facility is transferring from Workington, Cumbria, to Carlisle. The distance between these two locations is about 30 miles. As the report says, a maximum of 80 people a week take their theory tests in Workington – that isn’t many, and having no more than 16 people a day doing the test is hardly a sound justification for keeping open a facility which has an overhead which must run into quite a few tens of thousands when you consider the staffing and IT costs. But the main beef is simply – as the report puts it – that:

The cost-cutting move has sparked suspicion that practical driving tests will also be moved next year.

Now, it’s worth noting the DSA’s response to this:

The DSA relies for income on the fees we receive from our customers so we have a duty to spend that money responsibly while maintaining a good level of service.

There are no plans to withdraw the practical test service from Workington. However, maintaining a theory test centre in Workington is simply not cost-effective so we plan to close the centre at the end of August. Candidates from Workington will be able to use the existing theory test centre in Carlisle.

It couldn’t be clearer, could it? Not unless you’re an ADI (cars OR motorcycles, if you read the articles), of course, in which case it is as clear as mud.

Some cleverdick has had his calculator out and argues that 80 tests a week at £31 a time equals around £124,000 a year. Maybe for his next trick, he’d like to try using the minus key to subtract the salaries of the staff used to administer tests, those used to maintain the computers (whether on-site or otherwise), building rent and overheads, and so on. Without knowing the exact figures, I wouldn’t be surprised if the costs are greater than the turnover – BECAUSE 80 TESTS A WEEK ISN’T MANY.

They’ve already got the local MP on the case. As we all know, the job of the local MP is to take up any case – no matter how pointless – to show that he cares.

If only he also understood.

This is a bit of a rehash of something that comes around every year or so, but it still makes interesting reading in Fleet News.

A survey by Autoglass (the article marks this with an asterisk, but doesn’t appear to include the footnote to explain why) says that 76% of motorists say they haven’t read the Highway Code since they passed their tests, 21% say they regularly break the HC, and 68% say they break it now and again. Around 40% reckon they break 30mph speed limits, 9% don’t indicate, 5% admit to using mobiles (utter bollocks – it’s more like 50%), and 4% jump red lights.

But 62% rated themselves as “good” and 22% rated themselves as “excellent”.