Scrap K53

South Africa’s abhorrent traffic safety, and the worldwide reputation of our drivers as incompetent and dangerous, should be a clear indication that something is wrong with the way we licence new drivers.

Anyone who has interacted with the K53 driving test system, be it as an instructor, learner or tester, has had much to say about how terrible it is.

The yard test has no basis, pushing learners to rote learn nonsensical systems to park under conditions that do not reflect any real parking situation, and the road test punishes confident, safe driving in lieu of a checklist that encourages anxiety.

The fact that nobody drives or parks the way that our testing system requires us to learn should indicate how the system has failed.

The controlled environment of the yard doesn’t reflect real parking conditions, and it is a common complaint among drivers that they’ve never had to alley dock or parallel park after getting their licences, and when they have, the method they were taught to pass the test didn’t work.

Additionally, graduates of the K53 system have reportedly still struggled with important driving skills like highway merging, roundabouts and multi-lane traffic management, which the test does not adequately assess.

Many drivers who learnt only how to pass the test, but not how to drive, have become hazards on the road.

Due to the complicated and strict nature of the test, which automatically fails petty mistakes while encouraging irrelevant cautiousness for the wrong things, corruption has become rampant.

Traffic officials take advantage of the frustrating nature of the test, and their ability to grade according to subjective criteria, to demand bribes from prospective test-takers.

Repeated failures due to petty mistakes and the nonsensical nature of the test have led to many people giving up, and either getting fake licences, relying on inefficient public transport, or just driving without a licence altogether.

The inefficient nature of traffic departments has also led to long wait times.

It’s a common story among South Africans to have failed a test due to some petty infraction, like a non-dangerous roll in the starting block, and then being forced into a four-hour queue to re-book the test three months in the future.

A beneficiary of the K53 system has become a cabal of unprofessional driving schools and instructors, which take advantage of students desperately trying to get their licence to sell lessons that don’t teach the system properly, to push students to take more lessons.

There is a perverse incentive for driving instructors to inadequately teach their students so that the students keep failing, so they must keep taking lessons.

Any trip to a practice yard will see instructors verbally abusing students, neglecting their duties to chat with friends, or even washing their cars while on the clock with their students.

Many instructors are frustrated with what they also see as a dead-end job and take it out on their students.

I was personally taught incorrect information by an instructor, which led to me failing one of my tests.

Multiple traffic officers that I have spoken to have also expressed a disdain for instructors, who they believe teach students incorrect information just to extract additional wealth from them through further lessons.

The most frustrating thing about these incompetent and corrupt instructors is that they are enabled by the K53 system.

We shouldn’t be testing drivers through a system that only tests a rote-learnt (memory-learnt) system tested in a controlled environment.

Rather, we should be adopting testing systems used in countries that produce far safer and better driving environments – like Germany. Practical driving experience and time on the road should factor into getting a licence.

Formal driving schools, working in tandem with the traffic department, and being held to strict standards of professionalism, should be a part of the testing process, monitoring prospective students on the road with physical instructors, or dashcams.

Rather than a simple fail or pass test, getting a licence in South Africa should be a process undertaken through a school that tests actual driving proficiency.

Allowing many professional driving schools that fit a standard for testing would then free up the traffic department to undertake its other important functions – like enforcing traffic laws.

If we shift the focus from passing a test, to learning how to drive, South Africans will become better drivers across the board, while also eliminating a corrupt industry that makes every South Africans life horrible.

Written by Nicholas Woode-Smith, an economic historian, policy analyst and author at the Free Market Foundation.