Re-education of young driving offenders: Effects on recorded offences and self-reported collisions

New ways of educating offending drivers are being introduced, notably e-learning. This type of education has rarely been tested for its safety effects before. An e-learning course for offending young drivers was therefore evaluated as to its effects upon offence and self-reported collision rates. Significant reductions in number of offences and penalty points were found for an e-learning group, while this was not the case for drivers who had been fined only, or had taken a more traditional solely class-room based educational scheme. The e-learners also reported a larger reduction in collision involvement than a random control group, although a regression to the mean effect could not be ruled out. The results seem to indicate a positive effect of the e-learning course for young driving offenders. This conclusion, however, is to be interpreted in relation to the weak association between penalty points and collisions, and the low validity of self-reported collision involvement data. The present results lend further support to the use of e-learning driver improvement courses, although the most important type of data, recorded collisions, is still missing.

Research highlights
► An e-learning driver improvement course was evaluated for effects on offences and collisions.
► Recorded offences and self-reported collisions showed significant reductions after the course.
► The limitations of the study are mainly a short time period and low validity of the proxy safety variables.