But it’s not that easy. Because currently people in the UK do not visit a DVLA office to apply for or renew their licenses. The network of DVLA offices is small and not designed for the demand this would create.
It’s not just opening a cupboard door. It’s ensuring there are enough offices - conveniently located for people to use them. The offices also have to be designed so that eye tests can be administered in them (things like ensuring consistent lighting and placement and various issues that affect eye test results need to be considered too - it needs to be fair and accurate). That involves making changes to all the existing offices. The offices also have to be staffed. And trained to administer eye tests. And all the forms and processes need to be adapted to reflect the entirely new process.
Even the ‘just do it at theory test centres’ is naive. These centres aren’t operated by the DVLA and are not set up for eye tests. The staff are not trained to administer eye tests. There are capacity issues - it’s hard enough for people who need a theory test to book one without adding in appointments for everyone renewing a license, or updating their eye test every 2 years.
Same with ‘just’ getting opticians to do it. That’s creating an entirely new service and expecting independent businesses to just adapt their processes and create capacity (not just for the additional tests, but all the additional admin). Then there’s the data sharing issues. How is that going to be done? Is it going to be paper forms (for the DVLA to process, again requiring additional processes and resources) or some kind of electronic data sharing (which will require developing a whole IT system to achieve).
Then there’s the people who want all sorts of other tests in there. Reflexes. Who is going to administer that? Where? When? How are they going to be trained to properly and efficiently assess people’s reflexes? Will the test be fair to people with disabilities who are driving adapted cars? Cognitive tests? You going to get GPs to do that? 🤦🏻♀️😩 There’s so much spare capacity there, isn’t there?
It is so easy to decide there are easy fixes to these things. But there really isn’t. It’s complex stuff. Other countries have set their entire services up differently.
and there simply isn’t the evidence that doing all the work to make changes so there are more eye tests would significantly improve road safety. It’s easy to look at individual cases and think ‘something must be done’. But if you’re going to create new legislation and make big changes to driving licensing processes, you would want to be sure that it’s going to make a real difference.
Police data has shown that around 3,000 people are killed or injured by drivers with bad eyesight (or where eyesight has played a part in the cause of the collision) every year.
It sounds like eye tests would solve this problem on the surface. But whether it would actually make a difference is not clear. How many of those people just weren’t wearing prescribed glasses? How many of those cases was it the main, causative factor in the collision? In how many cases would the accident still (most likely) have happened if the driver had the right glasses on? This stuff makes a difference to whether your proposed solution will actually work.
If you go through the police accident data, they record all sorts of things. And they may determine that many things played a part in the cause of the collision. I’d guess that driving in the dark or in the rain is listed as a contributing factor to the cause of far, far more accidents on UK roads. Being distracted by your radio or fiddling with your centre console or dealing with fighting kids in the back of the car are also probably things that played a part in causing many, many collisions.
Maybe banning driving in the rain would make the bigger difference to road safety. Maybe insisting that cars don’t have distracting media systems would be better.
It’s not as simple as it might appear. And the stats are not as clear in defining the problem as people like to present them - never mind in determining the solution (which is different).