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The Lane Ranger, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Friday, September, 1997
Take a pencil for a ride to predict driving skill
By Joey Ledford
Michael Cantor can spend four minutes with you and determine how likely you are to crash your car.
He hands you a six-page test booklet and a pencil and you connect marked boxes spread across each page---1 to A to 2 to B, etc. He times you as you do this.
I was a little nervous when I took the test administered by Cantor, an Atlanta experimental psychologist who taught behavioral science for six years at Columbia University.
I didn't totally bomb out, but I was going too fast and made a mistake. "You do not have a career in bus driving," he said candidly.
MARTA uses Cantor's system, the WayPoint test, on prospective hires.
"We gave him 50 of our best drivers and 50 of our worst drivers," said MARTA spokeswoman Laura Gillig. "He had about a 90 percent accuracy rate with predicting who would have accidents."
"We found it would save us a lot of money in liability and repairs" to use the test, she said.
Likewise, Mike Yauney, safety director for Eastern Service Corp., a Columbus-based long-haul truck company, said he's most pleased with Cantor's test.
Eastern Service gave the test to 20 drivers on the payroll. Cantor recommended that eight of them not be employed. A check of the records of those eight showed they had had 18 accidents that cost the company $22,000.
The other 12? Three accidents costing $600.
"We've been using it for two months now," Yauney said. "I was just telling the boss the other day those [new hires recommended by testing] just went over 230,000 miles and haven't had any accidents."
Gillig said the test is only one of several factors used by MARTA in deciding who to hire. The transit agency is confident about using the test, she said, because it has proven so reliable.
The test measures two variables---one that Cantor calls channel capacity, which is the ability to process information at speed. "A copper wire has a low channel capacity and fiber optic cable is high," he said.
The other factor is situational awareness. Think of it as court sense in basketball, or the ability to see the big picture, Cantor Said.
For there to be a low collision rate, there needs to be a match between the levels of channel capacity and situational awareness.
"The higher your channel capacity, the faster you drive," he said. "My mother is 83, and she drives slowly. She never has collisions."
Teenagers tend to drive fast. But they may not have the situational awareness of Cantor's mother. Crashes result.
"The test is about 80 percent accurate in picking out the high collision driver," said Cantor, who sells it to companies that hire drivers.
That translates into a net 25 percent reduction in collisions, he said.
Cantor hopes parents will administer his test to determine if their teens are ready to take the wheel. "I think that will be one of the contributions this thing will make," he said.
Likewise, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is experiment with the test to see if it can help determine when it's time for elderly drivers to turn over the keys.
the key to Cantor's test is that it enables you to learn about your own capabilities. His report on the Lane Ranger advises that I "maintain extra following distance " and "slow down: don't drive faster than [my] ability to cope with sudden trouble."
I started doing the first one quite a while back. I'll have to keep working on the second.
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