This Training Tip of the Week will take us down a different road, where we’ll talk about Driver Distractibility!
This is an article on a small item that affects more drivers than you would think. The best method is to educate your students about different types of distractions (and how to avoid them).
Have you ever driven your car with a small piece of white paper sitting on your dashboard? It may be a parking receipt or grocery list for later; regardless of what it is, that little white piece of paper will naturally defer your focus away whenever you look in that direction.
This is Driver Distractibility: whenever you have something that catches your eye, even if it is only for a moment, it detracts from doing a visual search for.
Our students/drivers should be trained to approach the job like professional athletes, for they are trained to Recognize and React. Our students/drivers should take the same actions when they are behind the wheel.
Visual scans should pick up any movement that is occurring on the road, and they should recognize how that impacts their positioning, speed and space. If there are changing circumstances, they should React to that.
You have probably seen the driver who has most of his lifelong documents spread across the dashboard, right? All of those documents reflect onto the windshield giving a glow of differing colours part way up the glass. For the driver to focus their attention on near objects, as in the case of stopping, they have to look through this maze of reflections to see what they need to focus on.
Is it worth having all of this distraction in full view of the driver? Never. So, teach your students/drivers to have an immaculately clean dash and never place paperwork, wrappers, books or food on the dash to save the distractibility!
Remember our catchphrase for the year 2024: training, training, training.
Calling all Instructors and TTSAO Acreddited Schools
We invite you to submit your training tips to share in next week’s Training Tip of the Week. Your participation and offerings will truly benefit all our students, and we greatly appreciate your support. Thank you!