In our last newsletter (Summer 2025) our Chairman Joe Edwards wondered whether we should campaign for regular testing of drivers to try to improve road safety.
At the time of writing this newsletter a major local news story was the jailing of Brendan Banham for driving a motor vehicle dangerously (in Reading) whilst disqualified.
Long time RCC member Graham Bates shared his views with us on both these topics – Editor.
Death and injury from bad drivers were opined over by our dear leader Chairman Joe in the previous issue.
In his final paragraph he wrote: “Maybe we should campaign for regular testing for drivers…”
For some learners, that is already the case. More than a thousand took more than 10 attempts to pass the test from 2004 to 2013 in the West Midlands. Seventy attempted to pass the practical test more than 20 times.
Aren’t you worried that they all eventually passed? And this was just the West Midlands.
And these are just the legal ones, let alone those like brazen idiot Brendan Banham, 22, of Hermitage, who has just got a whole nine months inside and a 24-month driving ban for driving dangerously, while disqualified and without third-party insurance (so he kinda already was banned! And wouldn’t he be unable to find affordable insurance anyway when he’s out?).
TVP has a video of the chase. Have a look and be grateful you weren’t also in it, cycling.
My solution for Joe: the driving test is a misnomer. It should be completely restructured and renamed: “Use-of-the-road test”. Before the practical, learners should pass a cycling exam and all the theory for using the road. The only get-out clause is a disability, with a doctor’s note.
After all, any fool can drive, as Banham proves (except, of course, those fools who still can’t after 10 tries).
When I learnt to drive, the instructor didn’t need to teach me how to turn right. I already knew having been taught it in cycling proficiency lessons aged 10. OK, he needed to teach me the “mirror, signal” routine, but I knew where to position myself and, yes, when to signal. How to use the road.
Twenty years ago, the Transport Select Committee investigated testing because novice drivers were crashing, killing and dying too much.
So I wrote to the then Transport Secretary Gwyneth Dunwoody with my ideas, and I’m looking at her signed, creamy-coloured reply as I write this. While she was “grateful for your thoughts, which I will keep in mind”, the upshot of the committee’s report was not much, and she died anyway.
The driving test has been revised, but surely a ‘using-the-road’ exam before learners get behind the wheel kills many birds with one stone.
Not only would it educate better, it would oblige learners to understand the risks they pose, motivate them to get off their lazy backsides and instil the notion that there is an alternative to cars as well as prevent a hell of a lot of CO2 emissions.
But what do you think? Is it nuts or something the campaign can get behind?
Unlike Joe, however, I think attitudes have improved somewhat, despite a remaining mad petrolhead culture, evidenced in Reading by midnight racing round the IDR and ridiculous “meets” in car parks, sometimes “patrolled” by our traffic police with an admiring wink.
I believe it is nevertheless generally accepted that cycling is naturally a risky behaviour and if you do it and suffer, it’s partly your fault.
Decades ago, I asked my late mum: “Whatever happened to Dave the Milkman?” (a top, rugged-featured, sleeves-rolled-up-in-all-weathers bloke with a lovely home and family who let us boys ride a while on the back of his electric trailer-float at his speediest of walking paces between drops when women met him at the door in their nylon negligées).
She wasn’t at all callous, but she replied matter-of-factly: “He got run over by a lorry on the High Road going home on his bike.”
Graham Bates
