Drivers who head out of their home city to take tests in “less complex” rural areas are more likely to end up involved in crashes, the province’s auditor general has found.
As part of his annual value-for-money audits, acting auditor general Nick Stavropoulos found drivers from areas in and around Toronto are heading to smaller and more rural test centres to complete their driving exams.
The audit said it was a “trend” among urban drivers and was associated with higher crash rates “indicating that the driver examination program may not be effectively testing their ability to drive safely on Ontario’s roads.”
Brampton, Ont., was identified as one example in the report.
Between January 2022 and March 2023, the audit found novice drivers in Brampton who took their tests outside of the city had a crash rate that was 22 per cent higher than those who took their tests in the city.
The auditor general said it is so common for people to leave the city to take their driving test that the DriveTest Centre in Guelph, Ont., administered more tests to people from Brampton than from Guelph in 2022.
A total of 34 per cent of drivers being tested in Guelph were from Brampton, compared with 14 per cent who actually lived in the city itself.
Despite being one-fifth of the size of Brampton, Guelph administered 56,000 tests in 2022, compared with 49,000 in the Peel Region city.
Similarly, 35 per cent of those taking their tests in Lindsay, Ont., were from Toronto, North York or Scarborough.
The auditor general’s annual report said rural test centres can have “less complex” road test routes than their city counterparts.
The trend does not come as news to the province’s Ministry of Transportation, the auditor general said.
“Despite noting this trend, the Ministry has not analyzed why this is happening, its impact on road safety or whether controls should be put in place to encourage novice drivers to take road tests in the areas where they live, work or study, and will likely be doing most of their driving,” the report said.
In its response, included within the report, the province said Ontario had the “safest roads” in North America and that it would use the recommendations to continue improving the province’s road safety record.
The annual report also probed other areas of how driving tests are run in Ontario.
It found that less-experienced drivers from countries without driving licence exchange agreements had a significantly higher collision rate than newly qualified Ontario drivers.
The decision to remove portions of the G (highway) road test to clear a post-pandemic driving test backlog was also put under the microscope by the auditor general.
“Our audit concluded that the Ministry of Transportation did not have effective evidence-based driver examination programs to evaluate and test novice drivers thoroughly and consistently,” the report said.