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The Defensive Driving Course in Utah Gets Creative |
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Written by Jerry Malcolm
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There is a good reason that those who are charged with the public good like the people at the driver's safety offices in each state have a vested interest in getting their citizens to take defensive driving courses. The measures used to allow you to get a ticket dismissed or to improve your drivers record if you take a course are not put there just to torture you with hours of boring classes on how to drive. They know very well that the more people who drive the roads of the state who have had defensive driving classes, the fewer accidents there will be. So they will go to whatever extremes they can afford to use to encourage the population to become educated in defensive driving.
There may be no state in the Union who has done a better job of using fun and creativity in encouraging their citizens to get involved with drivers education course than Utah. One particularly successful program was used around the time of the World Series to link the love of baseball to learning to drive defensively. The program was called Operation TriplePlay and it as put together by the biggest and oldest driver's education course in the country, the AARP driver Safety Program.
The program is designed to inspire participation in offering and utilizing defensive driving education at all levels from students to sponsors to instructors. That is the "triple play" aspect of the slogan and it has been a tremendous success at raising the awareness of the importance of defensive driving programs and in adding new enthusiasm and life to the program that Utah already had in place. The participation has surged because of the Operation TriplePlay has not only made more people aware of how defensive driving courses can help them resolve a traffic ticket or get their insurance rates down, it has raised the awareness of the good of defensive driving training for people who take the courses for no other reason than to become better drivers.
One very attractive aspect of the Operation TriplePlay program that has created a lot of interest is a money back guarantee. The head of the Utah branch of the AARP Driver Safety Program has advertised that the fee for taking a defensive driving class in Utah will be refunded to anyone who does not feel they got enough value from learning defensive driving skills to justified the cost. It is important to note that nobody has cashed in on that offer yet.
The Utah defensive driver program is designed to help drivers at all levels, from the high school student just learning to drive to the senior citizen who must learn to drive safety in a fast paced world. The administrators of the Utah defensive driving program have put an emphasis on encouraging seniors to take defensive driving classes because accidents that seniors are involved in can result in greater and more serious injuries to them than accidents involving younger drivers.
The design of the Utah defensive driver program is intentionally structured to not be too tedious. To get a defensive driving certificate, students just have to take an eight-hour class, which does not include any tests or time behind the wheel. Instead, the program teaches essential defensive driving strategies and skills. Classes can be set up to focus on a specific part of the population such as on high school students or on senior citizens. Not only does this ability to customize the curriculum by age group help students learn defensive driving concepts that are focused on them, they are going to class with their own peers, which makes them feel more comfortable as well.
At the beginning and end of the class, students are often asked what value they see in taking a defensive driving course. Usually at the beginning of the sessions, the financial rewards of getting a ticket dismissed or lowering insurance rates are the most common values people come to the class to realize. But almost always, by the end of the class time, people see that the good strategies and skills to make them safer and more competent drivers far outweighs any financial incentives that got them into the classroom in the first place.
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