Director for Advance Drivers of America and responsible for the overall management and strategic direction of the Foundation. He has over 25 years’ experience in road safety research and policy development. As a board of governance member of SDAF, Eddie has been involved in the development and delivery of courses in road safety and traffic psychology for undergraduate and postgraduate students in UK and USA. Eddie has lead research teams examining a range of road user behaviour issues including drink driving, speeding, driver licensing, driver education and traffic law enforcement during his service in the police forces in UK.
Eddie Wren joined the police in Britain in 1971 and by 1974 had focused on the fact that dramatically more people were killed each year as a result of road crashes than were killed by crime – a situation that still persists to this day, albeit with a dramatically reduced gap. As a result, his chosen specialisation was to become a traffic patrol officer and he stayed in that role until the end of his police career. During this time, he further specialised in the safety of young drivers and motorcycle riders – the most at-risk group of road users.
During his police service, Eddie took six months’ unpaid leave and travelled widely (all by road) in north, east, central and west Africa – a continent for which he has very warm feelings – and he also did a lot of driving there.
Following his time in the police, Eddie became a professional photographer and did a lot of work for lawyers and insurance companies on crash scene photography and related civil investigations. He later accepted the opportunity to work as a senior instructor for the British School of Motoring [BSM] and was in charge of an area of about 3,000 square miles in the North West of England. Subsequent to this, he was head-hunted and he accepted an invitation to become the managing director of an advanced driver training company.
After leaving Britain and settling in the USA at the start of the new century, Eddie first established a not-for-profit organization called ‘Drive and Stay Alive’. He later went into partnership and jointly founded the driver training corporation ‘Advanced Drivers of America, Inc.’ [ADA], of which he is now the president, chief instructor and sole owner. Throughout ADA’s existence, Eddie has worked to bring it closely in line with all relevant areas of road safety research and likewise with all relevant areas of global best practice – something which makes ADA unique.
Eddie has closely followed the World Bank, WHO and UN initiative that has led to the current global ‘Decade of Action’ for Road Safety, and has attended multiple meetings at the United Nations, both in Geneva and New York. In 2011, he also became the invited and founding chair of the ‘Driver Behaviour, Education and Training’ committee of the International Road Federation [IRF], in Washington, D.C., and he was given free rein to populate the committee with his own choice of road safety experts from around the world. He is also the author/co-author of several published research papers on various aspects of driver safety.
And last but by no means least, Eddie is both delighted and grateful for the opportunity to work as overseas Director for Safedrive Africa Foundation, in which position hopes to strongly help increase the safety of road users in what he sees as a wonderful continent.