Defensive Driving
Aug. 4th, 2008 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI finally took defensive driving today. During my research I learned that you don't have to pay $25 for the course if you are not using the course to dismiss a ticket. Of course, I'm not sure where you can find these insurance-only courses. Except that I found scfr's blog entry Take a Defensive Driving Course for a Discount on your Car Insurance. Since I actually have GEICO (though this can work for other insurance companies, too), I followed her link and went to the National Safety Council's class which costs only $19.95.
I do not recommend this class.
It doesn't make you get up fifty times to check various numbers on your vehicle to make sure it's really you. Instead you just get asked some yes/no questions at the beginning (like "Your favorite color is red") and then you periodically have to answer them the same way later, so that part is well done.
And of course each section has to take a certain amount of time and if you read too quickly it doesn't like that. But it tells you how many more additional minutes you must spend and only makes you press a "back to the lesson" type button. So you can just set a timer for that amount of time and go off and do some interruptible chore, like laundry. This was okay the first time, when I had 7 minutes to blow. The last two times, when I had 31 and 37 minutes to blow, it got old. Especially the last time when I wasn't there while a security question popped up and thus didn't answer it in time and was logged out. (Logging in works great and brings you back to where you were, but who knows how many minutes I lost.)
The worst part, though, was the extremely poor writing. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but when you have to spend hours reading, mediocrely bad writing gets old very quickly.
Some statistics were bogus (over 90% of all deaths from transportation?) and even contradictory ("Slightly more than 50% of all fatal crashes occurred on roads with posted speed limits of 55 miles per hour or more" yet "Many drivers believe that the most dangerous driving situations involve high speed driving environments such as those that are encountered while driving on freeways or interstate highways. This is contrary to actuality." I'm pretty good at figuring out how seemingly opposing statements could both be true, but death sounds sort of dangerous to me.
Stupidest picture award: a photo illustrating the section about how drugs other than alcohol can affect driving. Pictured are: a small mound of white powder, white powder in lines next to a razor blade, some joints, a syringe, a spoon with a bent handle next to a candle, a bag of green flakes, a spiral notebook, a hardcover book, and part of a brightly colored vinyl bookbag, lunch sack or knapsack. I guess you shouldn't read while driving.
Best picture award: A moose grazing by the side of the road.
Scariest review question award: "In Texas, children younger than 4 years of age must be properly restrained in an appropriate child restraint device." True or false? Turns out this is true, though without knowing they are talking about while the kid is in a moving vehicle, it sounds like torture. Certainly you are not allowed to keep all your children younger than 4 years of age locked in the closet. (Not even in Texas.)
Favorite typo sentence: "If a driver is following too closely to the vehicle in front and has positioned him or herself between two cars in side-by-side lanes, there is no much room for evasive action."
I found myself trying to figure out who wrote this thing. A dumb, but enthusiastic person? A dumb person in a hurry with a pile of facts and a large word goal? A person under the influence of mind-dissolving drugs? I mean the sentences are barely even organized sometimes.
I am not even one of those editor-type people who can't help noticing every typo within a two-mile radius of me (obviously, to those who have been reading my blog). And it still drove me nuts.
One good thing was the breakdown of what happens during the first 7/10 of a second of impact in a vehicle collision, 1/10 of a second at a time. Also, I never thought about how motorcyclists are at risk from driving down the center of the road, where everyone's oil leaks, at the beginning of a rain storm, so we should give them even more extra space then.
Favorite good idea I've never thought of: When driving down the center of a road not wide enough to easily stay on your own side, one should honk the horn as one approaches a blind curve.
Advantages of this course over other ones:
* low cost
* convenient if you have a convenient computer with fast internet connection
* can do other things if you read too quickly
* do not have to set aside large chunks of time
* you do not have to continually get up to look up your VIN etc.
* cure for insomnia
Disadvantages:
* poor writing - bad grammar, poor organization, junior high school anti-drug extremism
* poor proofreading and at least one wrong answer on the mini review tests
* can't trust what you're reading
* all text and mostly useless pictures; the one video isn't even a video; it's a transcript of a video
* could take much longer than six hours if your breaks are too long or you fall asleep
Thumbs down.
I do not recommend this class.
It doesn't make you get up fifty times to check various numbers on your vehicle to make sure it's really you. Instead you just get asked some yes/no questions at the beginning (like "Your favorite color is red") and then you periodically have to answer them the same way later, so that part is well done.
And of course each section has to take a certain amount of time and if you read too quickly it doesn't like that. But it tells you how many more additional minutes you must spend and only makes you press a "back to the lesson" type button. So you can just set a timer for that amount of time and go off and do some interruptible chore, like laundry. This was okay the first time, when I had 7 minutes to blow. The last two times, when I had 31 and 37 minutes to blow, it got old. Especially the last time when I wasn't there while a security question popped up and thus didn't answer it in time and was logged out. (Logging in works great and brings you back to where you were, but who knows how many minutes I lost.)
The worst part, though, was the extremely poor writing. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but when you have to spend hours reading, mediocrely bad writing gets old very quickly.
Some statistics were bogus (over 90% of all deaths from transportation?) and even contradictory ("Slightly more than 50% of all fatal crashes occurred on roads with posted speed limits of 55 miles per hour or more" yet "Many drivers believe that the most dangerous driving situations involve high speed driving environments such as those that are encountered while driving on freeways or interstate highways. This is contrary to actuality." I'm pretty good at figuring out how seemingly opposing statements could both be true, but death sounds sort of dangerous to me.
Stupidest picture award: a photo illustrating the section about how drugs other than alcohol can affect driving. Pictured are: a small mound of white powder, white powder in lines next to a razor blade, some joints, a syringe, a spoon with a bent handle next to a candle, a bag of green flakes, a spiral notebook, a hardcover book, and part of a brightly colored vinyl bookbag, lunch sack or knapsack. I guess you shouldn't read while driving.
Best picture award: A moose grazing by the side of the road.
Scariest review question award: "In Texas, children younger than 4 years of age must be properly restrained in an appropriate child restraint device." True or false? Turns out this is true, though without knowing they are talking about while the kid is in a moving vehicle, it sounds like torture. Certainly you are not allowed to keep all your children younger than 4 years of age locked in the closet. (Not even in Texas.)
Favorite typo sentence: "If a driver is following too closely to the vehicle in front and has positioned him or herself between two cars in side-by-side lanes, there is no much room for evasive action."
I found myself trying to figure out who wrote this thing. A dumb, but enthusiastic person? A dumb person in a hurry with a pile of facts and a large word goal? A person under the influence of mind-dissolving drugs? I mean the sentences are barely even organized sometimes.
I am not even one of those editor-type people who can't help noticing every typo within a two-mile radius of me (obviously, to those who have been reading my blog). And it still drove me nuts.
One good thing was the breakdown of what happens during the first 7/10 of a second of impact in a vehicle collision, 1/10 of a second at a time. Also, I never thought about how motorcyclists are at risk from driving down the center of the road, where everyone's oil leaks, at the beginning of a rain storm, so we should give them even more extra space then.
Favorite good idea I've never thought of: When driving down the center of a road not wide enough to easily stay on your own side, one should honk the horn as one approaches a blind curve.
Advantages of this course over other ones:
* low cost
* convenient if you have a convenient computer with fast internet connection
* can do other things if you read too quickly
* do not have to set aside large chunks of time
* you do not have to continually get up to look up your VIN etc.
* cure for insomnia
Disadvantages:
* poor writing - bad grammar, poor organization, junior high school anti-drug extremism
* poor proofreading and at least one wrong answer on the mini review tests
* can't trust what you're reading
* all text and mostly useless pictures; the one video isn't even a video; it's a transcript of a video
* could take much longer than six hours if your breaks are too long or you fall asleep
Thumbs down.
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no subject
on 2008-08-05 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-08-06 02:08 pm (UTC)But sometimes the instructor also shares good stories, and sometimes there are good videos. One of my favorites is where they are trying to teach you not to try to beat a train to an intersection because trains don't have good brakes. They show two trains traveling next to each other on parallel tracks going the same speed. Then they point out the spot where one of the trains puts on its brakes. You can't even tell the difference for a while!
I've never been in a class where anyone besides me was there just for the insurance rates. Most people are there for speeding, and most of them for going more than ten miles an hour over the speed limit.
no subject
on 2008-08-05 11:11 pm (UTC)Sally
no subject
on 2008-08-06 02:03 pm (UTC)Even for someone like me with a cheap-to-insure old car and a good driving record, my payback time for a $25 course is just less than six months, and the discount lasts for three years. (Interesting, my insurance has gone up, but the defensive driving costs haven't. Last time my payback time was more like seven months.)