Van Driving Cards

… and what they are worth.

Well, as many have been told (or were to understand), I went and got myself a BYU Van Drivers Card. The card consists of a piece of paper with my name written on it and the initials of the dude who taught the class and showed us the video on the back. The class was, not so interestingly enough, insanely boring.

Basically, there was no driving involved, people just had to sit and listen and, to a smaller extent, participate so that the class would progress. And the dude from Czechoslovakia who was teaching the class, and had a rather thick accent, and who tried to make a lot of jokes that fell flat, THAT DUDE, also tried to draw out of us things he wanted to hear about how we could be safe driving vans. It wasn’t all that effective.

So, mentally I fell back in time some number of years (18 for those who are curious) to when I was 16 and taking Drivers Education at Temple High School in Temple, TX in the VoTech building where, wonder of wonders, the school had a relatively technical method of teaching and monitoring driving skills of the students in the class (I remember sleeping through most of the classes, JSYK). This was a projected video, reel-to-reel, that had timed marks that were, in turn, synchronized to different data points on the film where, as individuals in mock cars, we were meant to respond to the circumstances of the movie. The outcome, for me, was a barely passing grade; but the idea behind the simulator (not computer run) was to gauge whether or not the students (15 to 16 years old) were getting the principles of driving from the video.

Move forward 18 years and a couple of months and there I am sitting in a class with a bunch of traditional college age students all there with the same purpose as me, to get a Van Card to drive BYU owned vans. For one girl it was so that she could take the German speaking people in the Foreign Language Housing to buy groceries once a week. For another it was because she was promoted at the Bookstore and needed to be able to drive vans to deliver things. There were other reasons. I was the only one there who did not need a van card for my job.

The class starts and we talk about the four differences between a van and a car:

1. size
2. stopping distance
3. center of gravity
4. blind spots

I am not impressed. And then we come up with six excusses not to wear a seat belt. I don’t need six excuses, all I have to do is not wear a seat belt and if Erin is not in the car with me, I pretty much get away with it. My one reason is in protest against a common sense law that mandates the wearing of a seat belt. And even then, since purchasing the latest car, I don’t think I’ve driven farther than the end of the driveway without the safety belt on, period. So, other than my occasional protests which existed in the Jeeps I owned, while driving to Oregon to help move a siblings sister-in-law, and the Honda I drove that had an automatic shoulder belt, I am pretty consistent in wearing seat belts. Especially given that I am now married, we have a child on the way, and it really is common sense to wear a seat belt even if state and federal law requires it (stupidly).

One van driving requirement at BYU is to ensure that all passengers wear their safety restraints. As that was made clear I had to think back to the days of yore when I was first here (this go round) and whether or not the class I was in that did a multi-day field trip to the San Rafael Swell, if we all (or any of us for that matter) chose to wear safety restraints? I am not recalling it.

Regardless, the point in the class was to inform. Inform of what? Well, honestly, it was to inform of responsibility to the driver for the vehicle and what proper safe driving methods and practices are or were. Great. Now I know. However, the problem is that we are forced to watch a rather old and outdated video that requires the participation of the viewing audience in looking for possible hazards. The problem is that the image quality of the video (VHS) projected over an LCD screen onto a size the video is not capable of handling actually obscures the items that are meant to be looked for and as a result, seeing all of the hazards that, invariably (and ostensibly) the narrator is going to identify and ask if you saw it, is nearly impossible.

More, when approaching various man-made obstructions, truck-driving training indicates you actually watch signs, which never came up in the video, and when the narrator would get around to narrating a scenario I would’ve already seen a sufficient number of signs indicating what was coming up to look in the general direction of what the video expect and as a result (at least in my own driving) would’ve adjusted my driving to the situation at hand. However, since I broke my driving teeth (at 16 and 17 and maybe 18) on driving the family van to and from school and other places and chauffeuring siblings about, the outcome was driving practices that didn’t really seem to make sense to me.

Sure, you want to introduce students who are young and relatively inexperienced to proper and safe driving practices, like:

Always avoid backing up.

But the means whereby this was done was substandard and I am surprised that more accidents don’t happen as a result of mere driving stupidity. One of the things I would’ve appreciated, had it happened, was a statement along the lines of:

Past driving performance does not guarantee future driving safety. Accidents can happen to anyone.

The point to all of this, I am sure, is not that driving a van is good or bad or that getting a van card is worth the time or not (I may never use it as I am a backup driver), but more along the lines that a lack of proper oversight on the parts of the people issuing the cards probably leads to an increase in the number of instances with the vans and that a certification without proper testing of understanding and ability coupled with a record of past performance ultimately guarantees that vehicles are going to be driven poorly and people are going to get into accidents.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

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