Restore public safety reforms to Ohio transportation budget

True or false? All Ohioans must undergo a comprehensive driver’s training curriculum before taking the wheel with a license to roam Ohio’s roadways for a lifetime.

Many Ohioans, we’re certain, would be surprised to learn that the correct answer to that question is false. As Ohio Public Safety Director John Burn puts it, “A driver with no experience can take a test to get a license with ‘zero education.’”

Is it any wonder then that such a gap in Ohio driving law has contributed to scenarios in which some on-the-road license test takers have attempted to enter the vehicle on the passenger’s side or that others have crashed into nearby parked cars because they did not have a clue as to where to find the brake pedal?

Such surprising revelations — and other more serious ones involving death and destruction — about the consequences of inadequate or no driver’s training make an airtight case for rigid reforms in the education and licensing of drivers in the Buckeye State.

A package of tailor-made reforms to significantly beef up driver-training requirements arrived earlier this year in the laps of Ohio lawmakers in the form of the Drive Toward A Safer Ohio initiative of Gov. John Kasich’s administration. But instead of embracing the meatier requirements, state legislators instead chose to plow right over them by cutting them out of Ohio’s $7 billion transportation biennial budget for fiscal years 2016 and 2017.

It is now incumbent upon legislators debating the final version of the budget in a House-Senate conference committee to restore the responsible safety initiative before the final bill is passed and sent to Kasich for his signature. Short of that, lawmakers need to speedily introduce and enact the Drive Toward a Safer Ohio package of reforms as its own separate bill.

PROVISIONS OF INITIATIVE

As Burn rightly argues, comprehensive driver training and public safety are inextricably linked. His safety initiative includes several taut and needed reforms that underscore that connection. Among them:

Those seeking their first driver’s license would have to complete approved driver’s education programs.

The state would work to make sure that all driving schools and instructors live up to a strict set of standards that would improve the quality and quantity of education for drivers.

A new “distracted driving” offense would be created with penalties for those who engage in any distracting activity such as texting, sending emails, making calls by hand, knitting or reading a newspaper or book.

Collectively, such reforms could go a long way toward making a dent in the pain and suffering in our state caused by traffic crashes. That toll, while on the decline, remains unconscionably high. In 2013 alone, Ohio recorded 269,082 crashes that injured 69,105 people and killed 990 others, according to the Ohio Department of Public Safety.

We’re confident that Ohio’s elected representatives and senators will not act recklessly by stalling action any longer on promising reforms to lessen that grisly toll. Lawmakers can take the quickest and best route to heightened public safety by way of rapid restoration of the Drive Toward A Safer Ohio initiative to the pending 2016-17 transportation budget.