New York Safety Council Review 2020
Taking a defensive driving course can take points off from your driving record or get you an insurance discount.
New York Safety Council offers defensive driving online so drivers can learn the concepts right at home. So, we went through the course ourselves to see if it was worth it.
Read on for our New York Safety Council Review.
Pros
- New York State DMV-Approved
- Can be completed online
- Straightforward course
- No final exam
Cons
- Misleading prices
- Website is hard to use
- Poor customer support
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Table of Contents
How Does It Work?
The New York Safety Council seemed to be a pretty legit online traffic school, particularly because of the official-looking name. They offer a defensive driving course for drivers who want to get an insurance discount or have points removed from their driving record [1].
As with most online traffic schools, including the cheapest courses available, you have to sign up, complete the course, and submit your results to the DMV. In some schools, including the New York Safety Council, they will process the certificate for you so you don’t have to file in the paperwork yourself.
When we signed up for the course, we had a promo code to knock off $5 from the total price. While the discount was reflected in our total amount, we were shocked that our credit card was still charged the full price.
Furthermore, there were add-ons after add-ons that were being advertised to us. These were simple things such as an audio upgrade, which other schools already offer for the same price that the New York Safety Council charged us upfront.
We didn’t like these upsell tactics because they’re usually an indication of deceptive marketing schemes. We’ve encountered other traffic schools that do this, such as TrafficSchool.com. Still, we opted to go through the course to see what we’ve paid for.
And by the way, we had a few problems just from the process of signing up. It was confusing and the course didn’t start for us right away. So, we had to call customer service just for us to be able to begin the course. We’ll be discussing more about their customer service later.
The course itself was pretty straightforward. The reading material was easy to understand and all the essential concepts were there.
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However, the site kept crashing and stopping midway. It was not user-friendly at all, which is an important criterion for our assessment of the best traffic schools online, and the entire experience was frustrating. New York mandates a course timer for 320 minutes, but it took us longer than that because of all the technical difficulties with the website.
During the duration of our New York Safety Council review, the timer itself had issues as well. Sometimes it was off, sometimes it went fast, and sometimes it went slow. This was really annoying because there was an instance when we had to start over because the timer was buggy. We tried to call customer service over it but to no avail.
Speaking of their customer service, our experience wasn’t pleasant at all. We tried to reach them through the live chat first, but the automated response said that I had to wait and that the waiting time was 30 minutes before anyone could address our concern.
So, we tried to call their phone number instead to see if we could get a faster response. Unfortunately, it was still the same. We were put on hold and nobody was picking up even when half an hour has passed.
We called several times and when it was finally picked up, their customer service representative wasn’t able to solve the problem. We had better experience with Safe2Drive, which doesn’t even have a 24/7 customer support hotline.
Having to go through hoops just to be able to talk to a real person about an issue wasn’t great at all. When we checked some reviews online, we found out that some customers who got locked out of their accounts weren’t able to have the problem solved by the company’s staff.
Overall, our experience with New York Safety Council was disappointing. There were a lot of issues from the sign-up to customer support. Their website kept crashing throughout the course, causing a significant delay in the completion.
So if you’re on a time-sensitive case, we suggest you shop around for other credible schools like iDriveSafely.
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FAQS
How long is New York Safety Council?
New York Safety Council takes 320 minutes or approximately 5 hours and 20 minutes to complete. This is the fastest defensive driving course mandated by the state of New York. You have 30 days to complete the course at your own pace.
Is New York Safety Council Legit?
New York Safety Council is legit and approved by the New York City DMV. However, there are hidden fees and technical difficulties that you would encounter while taking the course. They have poor customer service as well.
Have other questions about traffic schools in general? Read our FAQs here.
New York Safety Council Review Conclusion
For this New York Safety Council Review, we have enrolled in the school and have gone through the course ourselves.
Our experience with the traffic school was riddled with a lot of difficulties. We had trouble signing up, there were upsell tactics, and their site kept freezing during the course. Furthermore, their customer support wasn’t very helpful.
If you’re looking to get points off your driving record or get an insurance discount, there are other easier traffic schools that would give you a better service.
Learn all about our experience with other sought after schools, including Arizona’s EZ AZ, family-owned Wise Traffic School and humor-based Comedy Traffic School.
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William Johnson is the owner and founder of RatedRadarDetector.org. He writes about car accessories, with his passion stemming from a deep enthusiasm for all things automotive. His website, RRD, focuses on in-depth reviews of car accessories to help people find the best and latest products in the market.
