2005 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

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Dominican College, Wicklow Town, Wicklow
Sarah Hanlon and Claire Sinnott
D.T.T. improving driving?

We wanted to do a project on road safety awareness in Ireland. We had many questions in our minds when we decided to do this project. With the help of our teacher, and the motorists in Wicklow, we have found our answers. We wondered:

  • What was the Drivers Theory Test about? Why was it there? Did it work?

  • How many people on our roads everyday actually knew and abided by the rules of the road?

  • Did the Drivers Theory Test actually improve the awareness of road safety among drivers?

  • Did motorists who had completed the Drivers Theory Test have a better understanding of the rules of the road compared to motorists who had not completed the test?

To find our answers, we gave out surveys consisting of questions from the 2003 Drivers Theory Test to people in our town, we searched for information on the internet and we observed a roundabout in our area to see if people used it correctly.

From carrying out our project, we found that a massive 81% of the drivers observed did not use indicators correctly when on a roundabout. We also found that 17% of motorists are not using seatbelts and 2% still use mobile phones while driving.

Of the fifty drivers we questioned, only 36% of them had completed the theory test. Out of these, only 72% scored 6 out of 6 in our questionnaire. Although this figure is large, the questions asked were taken from the driver theory book. The other 64% was made up of people who had not completed the theory test and out of them only 44% got full marks.

We came to the conclusion that all drivers should sit the theory test whether or not they had a licence before 2001 when the test was introduced in Ireland. We felt that the number of motorists who did not get 6 easy questions correct was too high and it is making our roads unsafe.

We also thought that a booklet explaining how to use a roundabout correctly would be useful because from our observations we saw that the motorists in Wicklow Town and Rathnew Village, Co. Wicklow, were not very conscious about how to use a roundabout correctly. We felt that if drivers are this unsafe on roundabouts in our area, we dread to think what the rest of Ireland is like!


Sarah Hanlon and Claire Sinnott at the Exhibition



Sarah Hanlon and Claire Sinnott entered their project in the Junior Group Section in the Social and Behavioural Sciences Category at the Esat BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in January 2005. Their teacher was Ms Siobh�n Crowe. They won a special award sponsored by The National Safety Council.


This article was sponsored byThe National Safety Council