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28 March 2024

Night, highway classes must for trainee drivers

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By Staff

The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has decided to make night and highway classes mandatory for trainee drivers as part of its revised driver’s licence training programme.
 
The new training programme, which is expected to go live by the end of this year, would also have other new features like fixed routes for training and tests and organized flow of classes from easy to tough skills, reported Khaleej Times.

The new curriculum is aimed at improving road safety as well as enhancing quality of training, CEO of RTA’s Licensing Agency, Ahmed Hashem Bahrozyan was quoted as saying by Khaleej Times.

“As a licensing agency we have a role to play both in enhancing road safety as well as customer satisfaction and I believe we have been playing that role well. However, we are adding new features to the drivers’ training to enhance the experience further,” said Bahrozyan.

Under the new programme, the training institute would receive a basic structure of the course, which would ensure the classes have an organized feel.

Rather than leaving it to the institutes to decide, RTA will provide a framework on the order of the classes, beginning with the easier ones and ending with the toughest.

Encouraged by the results of a pilot conducted on the new curriculum, the RTA believes that the new features would not only make roads safer but would also enhance pass rate of the candidate while not compromising on the quality.

One particular feature of the new curriculum is touted to play a great role in improving the pass rate and that is the use of same routes for training as well as tests. It is believed that familiarity of the route would boost the candidates’ confidence.

“The familiarity of the routes would give the trainees more confidence during the test and experts believe this would show in the pass rate,” informed Bahrozyan.

Apart from these changes the mandatory night training as well as highway classes would also be part of the new system.

“We want to give candidates the complete experience of driving during the training programme, we want them to experience all aspects of driving so that they are better prepared when they actually hit the road on their own,” explained Bahrozyan, adding that the new features would make roads safer.

However, the highway and night trainings would be done only when a candidate passes the road test. Bahrozyan says this particular phase of training would be done after the tests to minimise the risk of exposing novices to the tough conditions.