ITA head urges parents to use certified driving instructors

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Director General of Road Traffic, Island Traffic Authority (ITA), Lieutenant Colonel Sheldon Bryan, is encouraging parents and guardians to use certified instructors or driving schools to teach their children to drive. He indicated that licensed parents and guardians can also legally train their children to drive, provided no fee or payment is involved. “The law does give room for persons to instruct members of their family how to drive. But the reality is that a lot of persons learn how to drive by trial and error or by not going through the proper processes. So there’s a lot of bad habits in some of these instances, not all of them, because you do have people who know how to drive properly and are instructing children,” he told JIS News. “But, by and large, when you go through the certified instructors and you have a number of hours that you have to do around the steering, it is a step-by-step process in the teaching and imparting of the knowledge. So, students who are learning how to drive, by virtue of going through that, they are cultivating how to drive safely on the roadways,” the director general added. Colonel Bryan argued that the methodology of teaching is both an art and a science, adding that a lot of patience and time are involved in teaching someone to drive. “So, when you take a child and put them around the steering and go through the informal way of teaching, there are certain nuances and there are certain habitual developments that are missed and can make you unsafe on the road,” he stated. “One of those big ones is judging distance and time, knowing how to turn, knowing when to wait. Going through the process of learning does develop a lot of muscle memory as well, so that you are safe on the roadway,” the director general added. Colonel Bryan emphasised that “we don’t want people to miss the steps that are involved in causing people to be safe on our roadway”. “That is why we encourage parents to send their children to certified instructors and certified driving schools so that they go through the step-by-step process,” he added.