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PRACTICAL EXERCISES IN ROAD TRANSPORT EDUCATION

14th October 1966
Page 88
Page 88, 14th October 1966 — PRACTICAL EXERCISES IN ROAD TRANSPORT EDUCATION
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

THE written examination with a number of questions to be answered in a certain time has always held pride of place as the ■ asic method in road transport education of testing the ability of L candidate. Usually it is the only method employed to assess suc:ess or failure in the pursuit of a particular award. Common Room tas always advocated that, while written papers must play the major ole, individual work in preparation for the written paper, practical xercises with the results presented for assessment and the use A' orals should also be integral features of any examination system.

Practical exercises in the examination schemes leading to the nore advanced transport awards could have a double importance. lie examining body would be able to attest which students were nore capable of working on their own, collecting facts and preenting conclusions. But the benefits derived from this work could le much wider since the practical exercises which were well xecuted could fill in some of the gaping gaps in our detailed know!Age of road transport.

It is incredible how much planning which has a direct bearing on oad transport is performed by haphazard guesswork. To take a imple case: almost nothing is known about the amount of traffic ,enerated by the presence of a small group of shops, an office block 1r even a single hotel. The Traders' Road Transport Association is larticularly interested in this type of problem and anxious to get away from wild generalizations in answering such questions as Cm the case of a small group of shops). "What is the daily average of commercial vehicles calling at the group of shops?"; "What are the peak times for delivery to individual shops ?"; "How long on average do commercial vehicles call at the shops for unloading and what degree of congestion is caused?" Such surveys could, of course be extended to measure the generation of private car traffic and the resultant congestion and the effect of bus services of their absence on the trade of the shops concerned.

The importance of gaining some factual information on this problem from a wide scatter of simple shopping centres in Great Britain is obvious if future placing of these centres is to be apposite. A vast number of researchers would be necessary to carry out a sample survey; why not kill two birds with one stone by using the services of transport students to collect this information as part of their training? And, this is only one example, taken at random, of a large number of similar projects which need to be undertaken.

Of course, the supervision and assessment of this type of practical exercise is enormously difficult and there are severe administrative headaches in promoting such a scheme. But since the benefits are substantial if sufficient exercises of good quality are completed, the examining bodies could well receive grants from public funds to assist in boosting this type of work and to ease the administrative burden involved.


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