FROM 2005 through to today, BRAKE has evolved from a seed of an idea to an organization that has reached 15,000 teenagers at 50 schools and organizations about driver education and road safety.

And that is just the start.

If founder Rob Duncan has his way, the organization will continue to grow in the years ahead as generations of new drivers take to our roads.
For Rob the evolution of BRAKE has been a labour of love.

A Sergeant in the Queensland Police Service based at Jimboomba, Rob, like many of his fellow police officers, was sick and tired of being called to fatal road crashes involving teenage drivers and having to knock on the doors of distraught parents to tell them their child had just died in a car crash.

He was convinced the problem lay with inadequate driver education and that there had to be a better way to train young drivers. So after hundreds of hours of research about the problem he founded the BRAKE Driver Awareness Program in 2006.

The rest, as they say, is history. BRAKE today is reaching out to ever-increasing numbers of young drivers, evidence points to many young lives being saved by the program and best of all, more and more teenagers are embracing the BRAKE message.

While basic driver instruction is still left up to driving instructors, BRAKE complements what is taught with practical information on driver behaviour, passenger responsibility, resisting peer pressure, avoiding distractions, hazard perception, risk analysis, crash re-enactment and analysis of crash causes.

“Over many, many years I had been going to crashes involving deaths and had been giving road safety presentations as part of my job and I started to reflect on what I could do about it,” Rob said.

“At the time I thought I could do some research and there would be something I could find that could be implemented (in schools) to address the problem.

“But it turned out there was no program available, all the existing programs I could find - driver education, defensive driving, advanced driving, scare tactics, one-off presentations and mock crash scenes - researchers were saying they didn’t work and that they were causing more damage than good.”

With research showing that these programs were causing more crashes than they were preventing, Rob decided to bite the bullet and to create his own driver awareness program – BRAKE.

Now the aim is to get the BRAKE message out as far and wide as current resources permit.  After all, as Rob says, the lives of our children are too precious to sit back and do nothing.