Via Julia in the comments, this fucking stupidity.
A FATHER has hit out at the testing system for moped riders after his son landed himself in court.
The clue, here is landed himself in court. That is, he was entirely responsible for himself. We are not talking about a testing regime unless he had chosen to take a test with the DSA on a restricted 49cc machine, which, frankly, no one ever does. They wait until they are 17 and either move onto a car or a larger motorcycle. What they are talking about is CBT (compulsory basic training) which includes among other things, speed and speed limits. To suggest that it does not is to suggest that this boy wasn’t paying attention as I have noticed with young students in the past.
The 16-year-old boy was caught in Southchurch Road, Southend, as he travelled at speed of 40 to 50 miles per hour.
The law restricts sixteen year olds to machines capable of no more than 28mph Therefore, he was riding an illegal machine.
In his defence, the boy apologised for his behaviour but said it wasn’t clear to him what the limit was.
Then he wasn’t paying attention during his CBT and hasn’t bothered to look it up in the Highway Code, not to mention those fucking red circles on sticks with a bloody great 30 in them. No sympathy.
He said: “When I did my thing [TEST] it didn’t tell us a majority about the roads, and I’m quite forgetful person so it doesn’t help.
Fuck me! Motorcycle instructors have to keep students’ memories for them, now. I can assure you it was covered. It is an essential element of CBT.
However, he also said he felt the CBT (Compulsory Basic Training) test was not thorough enough to let youngsters loose on the roads on mopeds
Oh, father is a fucking expert now? CBT is just what it says; basic and it is not a test is is training. The clue is in the name – compulsory basic training. It covers machine control, theory and on road training – including a range of road conditions and exercises as laid down by the DSA. It is certainly adequate to let someone loose on the road as the instructor has to be satisfied that the student is not a danger to themselves and others before signing the certificate. It is not the end of the process and it is rudimentary. It is up to the individual to continue to learn and to keep up to date with the law – yes, even sixteen year olds. The words we are looking for here are; personal fucking responsibility.
He said: “He should’ve known when he did his CBT certificate. I dropped him off at 9am and he was done by 1pm.”
It is rare to finish by that time, to be fair – usually I finish around four or even later. However, if all the trainer had was one or two mopeds, which require little effort to control, it is entirely possible to complete in that time. I had a trainee complete all of the off-road elements by about 11am recently because he had ridden before and he was my only student. I could, had we decided to go straight out onto the road instead of taking a lunch break, have been finished by oneish.
“There’s no way he could have learned the highway code in that period of time.”
We do not teach the Highway Code. We don’t have the time nor are we required to do so. Indeed, it is impossible to do so. We remind students that they are responsible for getting a copy and familiarising themselves with the content. We are not wet nurses.
He admitted he should probably have sat his son down with the Highway Code himself.
Indeed. Maybe all is not lost after all…
Doesn’t know what the speed limits are in an area in which (I suspect) he lives? Christ, that’s a piss-poor excuse.
Indeed.
I would suggest that someone finds a way to put this father in front of a magistrate and have his driving licence removed.
Clearly the father concerned is simply too retarded to even pick his nose, let alone undertake a medium complexity task like driving. He cannot possibly be safe when blessed with cretinous stupidity such as this.
He should be banned for life, or better still euthanased, in the overall interests of the human race.
If that moron continues riding, his father will no doubt shortly be investing in one of those chavvy ‘Oor Bairn’ floral tributes.
My father put the fear of God into me when I began riding – at 22, having held a full car licence for four years. It worked, that’s why I am typing this without a fucking pencil in my teeth.
“When I did my thing [TEST] it didn’t tell us a majority about the roads, and I’m quite forgetful person so it doesn’t help.”
I think that the magistrates should have been more lenient, seeing he was dealing with a congenital idiot.
Fear of God works very well when it comes to road awareness. My driving instructor in the 80s mentioned, in every lesson, that the small Metro I was in charge of was actually “one ton of killing machine”.
“Fear of God works very well when it comes to road awareness”
Exactly.
I gave up riding when I realised that I’d lost my healthy fear of being mangled to death under a truck. I was working as a courier and I think eventually I just got used to the constant hazard from other drivers. It needed a couple of accidents (which I had no right to walk away from – sometimes God really does look out for his fools) to hammer the point home, but it finally took. I was riding blithely into situations which, a couple of years previously, I’d have spotted a mile off and avoided like the plague.
I realised all of that intellectually of course, but I also knew that on a gut level I was just too comfortable in potentially lethal situations to be able to anticipate them properly. I had started smart and gradually become an idiot.
Quitting wasn’t a decision I reached lightly – biking had given me so much and developed me so much over the years – but I still think it was the right thing to do.
Of course, if you’re the type of person who won’t look inside themselves, if it could never possibly be *your* fault, then eventually it’s either court, hospital or the morgue.
~R~
A training school that thinks they can do a CBT in 4 hours is taking the piss – there is a compulsory 2 hour on road element and, if you are doing it properly, the introduction to the motorcycle can take an hour with a group of students so that leaves another hour or so to do all the off-road control skills, the introduction to driving on the road and the writing up of the certificate afterwords.
That school, like too many of them, was cutting corners and the student was woefully ill-prepared for the road (even if he was not quite as thick as the article makes out).
It is a shame as a well run school will get people ready for the road and give them skills and confidence they need to start out. But some of the robbing bastards that run them would rather scam money out of innocent people and let the new riders fend for themselves. 🙁
All valid points and ones I considered when writing the post. We run CBTs from 08:30 in the morning and consider it a good one if we finish at 16:00. However, there are caveats. One I mentioned. If you have a couple of teenagers on automatic machines who have ridden off road, the off road part of the syllabus becomes little more than assessment and there is no need to labour it – not to mention one whole activity becomes redundant (gear changing) and the controls chat is much reduced. So, yeah, it is possible to wrap up by about one o’clock in such circumstances if you skip lunch. If an audit of the school’s CBT certificates showed a significant number finishing at this time, then, yes, there is definitely a problem. The odd one or two? Unlikely.
Another caveat is that the timing as quoted may not be entirely accurate – so the time might not be as tight as we are led to believe.
All of that said, my points remain intact for one very good reason; personal responsibility. When I learned to ride as a teenager on a BSA C15 SS80 (for my sins) not only did CBT not exist, I had no formal training at all, yet my machine was legal and I fully understood the prevailing speed limits because I made it my business to do so. There is no excuse – not even an accurate one about the quality of tuition. You really have to be as dense as ebony to not know what the speed limits are, frankly.
You are quite right, when I learned I could jump onto a Honda CB250T Dream and ride about with L-plates on (and I did).
However there were quite a lot of fatalities. One mate of mine was a paraplegic by the time he was 18 and a couple of others died. This seems less is a problem today, the ‘serious’ crashes are, more often than not, adults. Perhaps the same sort of adults as you and I who did not have to undertake a CBT – although I did the excellent RAC-ACU 10 Sunday mornings training and was a better rider for it.
I wonder whether the reported speeds might have come from ‘witnesses’ rather than the police and may not bear much relationship with reality. The youth may also have de-restricted their scoot but still 50 mph from a 50 is pretty unlikely.
The RAC/ACU scheme was where I started my training career.
Me too, then Star Rider, STEP and then a break before getting the CBT and DAS certificates at Cardington in the late 90’s.
I am in agreement with Mr Longrider though in my case my first machine was a CZ125, if you cannot work out what a speed limit is, there is no way on God’s earth that you should be anywhere near a moped, let alone a bike or a car. What is it in this day and age, in my day it would have been a mark of honour to get caught at between 50 and 60 on an FS1e. We would have left the magistrates court glowing with pride and dreaming of what we could do on the RD350 LC. Most likely the father is a bloody idiot and the kid has done what generations have done before hand and come up with a bad excuse.
I actually took my moped test (they weren’t limited to 30mph and required to be a flimsy weight then). It caused no end of bother with the cops as I was legal with no L plates and I could carry passengers (and did very occasionally).
I got a producer every five minutes from a stern and nasty copper who said “I bet you are lying sonny” and then a bonus wait in the police station to be sneered at again for being legal. Times have changed, but not enough.
Although I didn’t have to take CBT, I did do an RAC/ACU voluntary scheme and it was very, very worthwhile. Touch wood, all limbs still here though I’ve been “between bikes” for about 30 years now.
Then he wasn’t paying attention during his CBT and hasn’t bothered to look it up in the Highway Code, not to mention those fucking red circles on sticks with a bloody great 30 in them. No sympathy
I have no sympathy for anyone who breaks the speed limit and then is caught and fined for it. Except for those who broke it inadvertently because the limit wasn’t signed properly or the sign was obscured. I have managed to drive for 30 years without getting a single speeding fine or being nabbed for any other driving offence. As a high mileage driver, if I can do it, so can anyone.
His eyes are probably on a Honda V4 Crosstourer.
When I started motorcycling in the late 1970s a seventeen year old could ride a 250 on ‘L’ plates without any training. Starting out we were mainly restricted to slow bikes by lack of cash. The test was said to be laughably easy too, pass that and you could ride a Kawasaki with rocket ship performance combined with appalling handling. Nobody would think of blaming lack of government backed training if they broke the law or fell off. Incidently, I gave up motorcycles and then returned later, so I did the CBT, a three day course and the pursuit test.
Regarding the OP, isn’t this guy’s attitude that the state is responsible for everything short of wiping his arse for him? Nothing that happens to him or his son could possibly be their own fault, somebody else just has to be to blame.
Precisely.