Tony Lamsdale speaking about the Speed Awareness Course. (As a presenter, not as an attendee!)
Tony has been a RoADAR member since 2012. and joined the group to get qualified to ride for the Severn Freewheelers (Blood Bike) Group.
He has a licence to drive tractors and LGV and has just passed his car test at Gold standard.
Having worked for IBM and offered redundancy, Tony decided to take a completelydifferent career path and registered to work for his CPC licence, qualifying for Commercial Vehicle driving within four months and is now CPC licenced to drive 44-tonners.
To add to this, Tony registered with AA Drivetec, the academy arm of the breakdown company which delivers training packages to commercial firms for fleet drivers and also “law breakers”.
Being a Tutor for RoSPA holds a lot of weight and he was accepted for the course on the strength of this. Most of the AA Drivtec trainers are ex driving instructors.
AA DriveTech trainers are independent trainers delivering courses to people who have fallen foul of the law by various means: driving on the wrong side of central road signs, poor decision making, speeding, poor driver alertness and many more.
People who have been stopped and will get points on their licences attend these courses to lessen the penalties.
Tony thinks it is a shame that you actually have to have “sinned” to attend these courses as if they were taught as part of driver training many of them would not have the problem.
Tony trains on the Speed Awareness Course. The course is four hours long, twenty people to the course, and in 2015 1,207,507 people attended the course. Most seem to think is “was not my fault” “the copper was hiding” but with the modern technology there is a no argument situation.
Tony tries to keep the courses “light” while impressing the importance of speed awareness, the whole point is to keep people safe on the road, and get people to take ownership of their driving responsibilities.
There is no difference between males and females in this catchment, both are more or less equally represented and classes are mixed although the males seem a little more aggressive at the beginning of the courses.
Speed is still the biggest killer on our roads, 28% of fatalities are caused by inappropriate speed; 186,189 people injured of which 22,144 were serious life-changing injuries.
The figures are, however, reducing year by year which shows that the modern technology and training is beginning to have an effect.
The technology is improving year on year and will only get better. It is the “ish” situation that catches people out – they do not realise that a slow collision will be fatal, “I was only doing a couple of mph over the limit”
The reasons for people speeding are explored and discussed within the group, the remedies frequently coming from group participants themselves. They are told that their driving licence does not belong to them, it belongs to the DVLA and can be taken away, so look after it.
This was a most informative and entertaining talk and we thank Tony very much for taking the time to come and share this with us. Makes me almost want to go on the course myself, but of course, we are RoADAR trained, so we have already done it!
Mary Southgate | 
