Raising driving school standards

Of late, MIROS have been making quite a number of press releases. There is even an unofficial MIROS blog. Efforts made by the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research to bring road safety discussion to the public should be commended. From a personal capacity however, if I could speak to MIROS, I would ask them to look into our driving school curriculum instead. Although there might be some obvious technical issues with the agency's "areas of jurisdiction" as driving school curriculum comes under the direct purview of JPJ Road Transport Department. But if both JPJ and MIROS can work around this is a real stumbling block to achieve to goal of lowering road fatalities, meaningful improvements will not happen until we address the source of the problem.

Looking back at my own experience when taking my driving lessons, it was a complete joke. My driving instructor asked me if I knew how to drive, to which I answered yes, not out of some adolescent arrogance (I learned driving when I was 9, theory only course as I could barely reach the pedals), but rather it was answered without giving much thought, nor elaborating any further. She pulled over at the road shoulder and asked me to take the wheel. Brave woman. The driving theory lecturers were of little value. The curriculum looked like it was drafted more than 50 years ago. There was absolutely no mention about driving under different weather conditions, night time driving, dealing with various other vehicles including motorcycles and heavy vehicles on highways and B-roads and the associated blind corners or blind crests etc etc.

Some critical skills which I found sorely missing in our driving school curriculum (at least when I took my driving lessons) are :


1. Night time driving
Almost all modern cars come with night mode rear view mirror. The driver only needs to push the small little tab at the lower-middle part of the rear view mirror to switch to night mode. Rear view mirrors are specially made in such a way that they are able to work from two different angles, one for day time and another for night time that cuts out a large portion of the light. This effectively reduce glare from cars behind. Surprisingly a very large number of local motorists are completely ignorant of this very basic feature, and needlessly put up with glare from tall vehicles or even bright HIDs. Neither my driving instructor nor the examiner from JPJ showed me this.

When driving on two lane country side B-roads in the night, the glare from oncoming cars can be quite disconcerting. Learner drivers were not thought to focus / trace their path of driving not directly on the cars ahead but shift their gaze to the white lines along the road instead. There are there for a reason.

An alert driver is also able to tell / check his headlamp alignments just by looking at the light path of their headlamps. The left beam (right hand drive countries) should point further out than the right beam. And the reflection from the car in front of you should be on the same level.

Yet here and there we still cars driven without their headlamps switched on. You would think that the driver would notice it once they hit slow traffic and notice the absence of reflection coming off from the vehicle in front. But no....

When approaching pedestrians, guard house, or anywhere with people directly ahead of you, it is considered polite to turn down your headlamps and switch it to parking lights mode. In some countries, drivers are thought that whenever they are in the first line of cars at a traffic light with a busy pedestrian crossing, they must turn down their headlamps to parking lights mode.

Fog lamps - front and rear, they should never be switched on a clear weather. It's bloody annoying to follow behind the rear fog lamp of a car when it's bone dry with starry clear skies outside. Even if it is raining, they are still not necessary. Only in the worst type of thunder storms are they necessary. In many countries, including Singapore, use of fog lamps, even in the rain, is illegal.

2. Vision and focus

Blind spots - modern cars, in order to pass increasingly strict crash safety regulations, as well as to keep up with modern design trends, tend to have thicker side pillars. As an unintended consequence, blind spots in some modern cars can be quite big. Learn to adjust your side mirrors properly. Setting up a side mirror properly to minimize blind spots is a bit counter intuitive. You shouldn't be able to see the sides of your car on the side mirrors. At most, only a slight hint of the car's sides should be visible. It takes a bit getting used to but this is the way to minimize blind spots. They don't teach you that in our local driving schools. And always always look over your shoulders before switching lanes. Small cars and bikes can sometimes be hidden in the blind spot area.

Having seen so many rear end collisions that happen on perfectly straight road, I sometimes wonder if the drivers are drunk / distracted / not paying attention or ... the dumbest of all - they are not even looking on the traffic ahead correctly! If your eyes are trained solely on the vehicle directly ahead of course your reaction time will be slower. Drivers should look far ahead, well ahead of the immediate vehicle in front of them and have a good tab on the average speed of the vehicles ahead, whether are they speeding up or slowing down.

Blind corners - drivers were never thought how to make use of the road shoulder or all the road space available to them when negotiating a blind corner. You don't walk into a path that you can't see. Likewise you don't use drive on a path that you can't see very far ahead. If you are in a right hand drive country, and you are taking a long right hander, you aren't going to see very much further ahead if you follow your instinct of keeping the wheel turning right, following the road. Take the outer lane or move slightly outwards (left side) to allow yourself to see further ahead, not stubbornly hanging on to your wheel looking at nothing but the tunnel wall or the guardrail no further than a meter ahead. If there is stalled vehicle ahead, or some road debris then you would've done yourself in.

Its the same with blind crests. When you are climbing even a mild incline / slope you can't see very far ahead. Back off the throttle. If there is a traffic jam or a stalled vehicle immediately after the crest you are surely going to hit it. And because you car have just gone over the crest, physics of gravity dictate that the weight of your car will be lightened momentarily, and the vehicle's suspension unloaded. Within this short period of time your brakes are not going to respond very well because they won't get sufficient traction to stop the car. You can guess what will happen next.

It's a simple rule, until your visual distance and braking distance aligns, back off the throttle.

And lastly - objects are closer than they appear on the (side) mirror.


The closer you are to the vehicle in front, the less of you can see of the road condition ahead. Driving schools teach you not to tail gate, but they don't exactly teach nor test learner drivers on planning to execute an overtaking move. Back-off the throttle before any overtaking to give yourself a wider view of the surrounding (rather than having your windscreen "filled" with the car in front), and once you have pull out don't hesitate to punch the throttle to the floor if necessary. It's so damn annoying to break your cruising speed pace, hard on the brakes just because some idiot is taking his own sweet time passing someone, oblivious to the traffic rapidly backing up behind.

3. Adapting to different environments
When you are in a car park complex, especially those in shopping malls, you need to particularly alert on what lies behind those many pillars. Did you know that you should switch on your headlamps everytime you enter a car park complex? Irrespective of how brightly are they lit. The light beam of the headlamp is to warn cars / people around or hidden behind a pillar to notice an approaching vehice. The same kind of "always asking what's around" needs to be ingrained in the mindset of every driver.

Can you really look around / behind these pillars?

In the rain - do you feel difference in traction, a sign of aqua planning. Or cross winds. These things can't be learned in theory. Which is why in many countries the driving test / lessons involves significant hours of night time driving, and even more developed countries, driving simulators as well.

4. Handling modern cars
Vehicles with automatic transmissions, proper disengagement / re-engagement of the overdrive gear. No mention.
Anti-lock brakes - to stomp on the brakes hard, keep the pressure and steer away. No mention.

5. Hazard lights
Our laws are pretty vague on this and a review is overdue. Even in Thailand, (and Singapore), taxis don't just turn on the left signal before stopping to pick up / drop off passengers. They put on the hazard lights well in advance before they stop. Noticed that Rapid KL buses follow this rule but not our local taxis.

Take a page out of truck driver's driving code in many countries, hazard lights should be used in conjunction with reverse lights when maneuvering into a parking spot. Here, the use of a turn signal when parking is to "book" your parking spot.



When approaching rapidly slowing traffic on a highway, the last car in the queue needs to switch on the hazard lights. Ignoring whatever the archaic rule books says, doing this have probably avoided myself from being involved in many rear enders. It requires some pretty alert and quick move from the driver. It is difficult for fast coming cars from behind to know if traffic is merely slowing down or has come to a complete stand still just by looking at your brake lights. This is why many higher end cars, especially from European makes have multi-stage brake lights that will either illuminate a lot brighter or even flash rapidly and turn on the hazard lights automatically (Proton's Exora has this feature) when subjected to hard / panic braking. Could have averted many rear-enders if more people adopted this. But again, this not in our archaic local driving code though have I personally adopted this practice.
So something like this can be avoided


5. Sharing with road with motorcyclists and heavy vehicles
Because of their size, motorcycles are a lot closer than they seem in the mirror.
Because of debris, potholes, cross winds, motorcycles don't and cannot stay on exactly the same path all the time. Make provisions for this.

Lorries, they have huge blind spots on the area directly in front of them, especially at the passenger side. The video below should explain this clearly. There was no way for the lorry driver to see the Mercedes that had came into the middle lane. And heavy vehicles take a lot longer to slow down. So do not ever, ever cut in front of a lorry. You will get mowed down. Especially if you are descending an incline. It's not necessarily because they are big bullies. Often it is because they honestly can't see you coming.


The local culture here don't take driving very seriously. Below is an interesting take from a Finnish driving school. Our driving school curriculum have hardly changed since the days of my father, who got his driving license in a Morris Minor.