Tough to Put the Brakes on Lousy Driving

Drunk drivers and safety defects are the issues the federal government and independent safety advocates almost always target when it comes to demanding better highway safety.

That emphasis, though, all but ignores the much greater problem of drivers in perfectly safe cars who are perfectly sober but generally incompetent behind the wheel.

“There are so many drunk drivers with no license and the system has a hard enough time catching those people,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety. “The problem of catching the simply bad driver is even more difficult.”

You can see them every day on the highways, impatiently tailgating, changing lanes abruptly, cruising along oblivious to the cars around them and generally going too slowly or too quickly in any given situation. Often, they have a poor knowledge of traffic laws and revel in their aggression.

Government statistics starkly demonstrate the problem.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles two years ago redesigned its written drivers test because so few people could pass it. But even more people are failing the new test. Steven Gourley, DMV director, reports that 77% of first-time test takers flunk the exam.

The results of the driving portion of the licensing exam aren’t much better. DMV flunks 34% of the people who take the driving test on the highway. And that test was redesigned in recent years to remove the subjective judgments of DMV test examiners.

“Driver safety is our number one job,” Gourley said. “But tests don’t determine it. We can’t make people better drivers.”

Gourley worries about the safety of DMV examiners who ride along in the driving tests and says that in some cases examiners have had to grab steering wheels to avoid accidents. In at least one case, he said, an examiner jumped out of the car to get away from an incompetent driver.

DMV examiners were involved in 332 accidents while giving driving tests in the most recent fiscal year, causing 106 injuries to the examiners.

It seems that people do crazy things when they get near the DMV. One applicant last year was waiting in line to take her driving test at the DMV office in Culver City when she suddenly floored her car and blasted through the south wall of the office, severing the leg of one person inside the building and injuring four others.

Gourley said the 78-year-old woman became angered when she thought somebody was trying to cut in front of her.

You can only wonder what happens once these kind of people hit the road after their license test.

One indication is the DMV’s revocation and suspension program.

You could staff a major army with the people who lose their driver’s licenses every year in California: 1.6 million.

Keep in mind it isn’t easy to lose your license. The DMV uses a point system--a speeding ticket is one point--and classifies a driver as a “negligent operator” subject to license suspension if he or she accumulates four points in 12 months, six points in 24 months or eight points in 36 months.

So you can get seven speeding tickets in three years and keep on trucking. You might think those 1.6 million license suspensions were all drunk drivers, but that judgment isn’t supported by the facts. More than half of the tickets written in California are for speeding.

Of course, losing your license doesn’t mean you can’t drive--only that you can’t do it legally. There is a huge population of unlicensed drivers in California, though nobody is quite sure how big. The California Department of Justice does not track citations issued for driving without a license.

To a driving scofflaw, a citation is a mere inconvenience. So long as ticketed drivers are sober and have not committed an overt act of assault with a vehicle, they generally will not go to jail. So people can accumulate terrible driving records and the DMV is powerless to do anything about.

It’s the same all across the country. Take, for example, the case of dump truck driver Willis Curry, who was convicted in the District of Columbia of involuntary manslaughter in 1998 for running a red light, rolling his truck onto the car of a high school student. Curry had accumulated 31 moving violations in the 10 years before the fatal accident.

Is there a case for permanently revoking a license if a driver exceeds a lifetime ticket limit? Or subjecting unlicensed drivers to severe criminal penalties for repeated driving offenses?

Gourley said he does not believe there is either popular or political support for tougher licensing laws, at least those that apply to sober drivers. He notes the outcry by older drivers when the state mandated more frequent testing for people over 70.

“There are ways to assure drivers are more qualified and competent behind the wheel,” he said. “That would probably lead to fewer accidents. But at what cost to the intrusion on the lifestyles of the people of California?”

Ditlow, the safety advocate, sees public policy as a reflection of the enormous commitment to the battle against drunk driving.

“It’s the lesser of the two evils,” Ditlow said of incompetent drivers. “I’m not condoning it. But when you look at the world of discretionary justice, you give more discretion to the person who is not morally reprehensible. But this can be just as deadly.”

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Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Please do not telephone. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com.