On the whole, I don’t like telling people what to do. Where governments have a clear choice about whether to interfere in people’s lives or not, I usually think they shouldn’t.
Overreach is tiresome and we will probably get along just fine without it, so unless it’s really obvious that something needs intervention, governments should just facilitate what we reasonably want to do and otherwise leave us alone. I suppose I don’t trust ‘them’ not to mess things up.
I’ve always felt this way about driving. Yes, perhaps it’s daft that you can pass a driving test at 17 and barely think about your licence again until your grandchildren notice that you keep nerfing the garage door and in the meantime you can pick a car off the shelf that weighs 2.2 tonnes and goes from 0-60mph in 2.0sec without any additional training.
But despite that, the UK still has the fifth-safest roads in the world, narrowly behind Japan and only marginally bettered by Norway, Sweden and Iceland, so we must be doing all right. Leave it alone.
Then I took three long and utterly miserable drives last week. It was half-term, which never helps standards, but still, on a Friday evening and over a weekend, I’ve never been so annoyed by the amount of dismal lane choices, poor speed choices, hopeless signalling and clear distraction.
After that, I was driven around by, well, let’s call him a family friend to keep him anonymous. He drives a lot, but it has been decades since his last instruction. At six roundabouts, he didn’t manage to once signal correctly, and he often drove at the same speed whether on an A-road or in town – too slow on one, too fast in the other.
And the more I pay attention to it, the worse I think our driving standards are getting.
Bad driving, particularly when it comes to choosing lanes on motorways, is an epidemic. We’re a nation of ditherers and dimwits who think that so long as we don’t get nabbed by speed cameras, we must be doing things right. We’re not.
In a car, negotiating lines of cars steadfastly refusing to leave the middle lane and signalling appallingly at roundabouts is irritating. If you’re trying to drive a lorry among these people, it must be infuriating to the point of self-combustion.
And so, with a heavy heart, I think life would be improved by… ugh… intervention. A scheme. A policy. Interference. I’m not suggesting that we should all have to take another full driving test, but I do think some kind of mandatory update or refresher training to remind drivers of their responsibilities would be helpful.
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The only thing that matters these days is not getting caught speeding. Nobody cares about good driving any longer, in fact given the nature of the cars sold nobody cares driving, all the electronic aids and menus to get through, it's no surprise driving has become semi autonomous albeit unofficially.
This article is spot on, there should absolutely be a mandatory refresher course to pass in order to keep your driving license. Would probably work best to be done every 10 years when the photo card of the license is due for renewal anyway. I mean you have to do a refresher every 3 years to drive forklift trucks so surely every 10 years for motor vehicles is more that lenient enough. I'm sure a lot of people totally forget that having a driving license is a privilege & not a right. They also clearly forget how dangerous their bad habits are as it's beyond belief how atrocious driving standards are these days.
As for the self confessed 'middle lane hoggers' above; it's just total laziness & invariably results in not enough attention being paid to your surroundings. No one's asking you to nip in & out of every gap but not being bothered to indicate & move your steering wheel slightly if there's a gap of more than 20 seconds just shows that what you really can't be bothered with is paying attention. And that's what results in all the issues faced by others having to make 4 lane changes just to get past you or people having to queue up in the outside lane whilst you're enjoying vegging out. I don't buy the not being able to be let out again argument either as I've hardly ever had an issue in 20 years of driving provided you indicate in advance enough.
I (mostly) enjoy my driving, its a skill that I continually try to develop, and do well. Sure, I'm not perfect, but I often think I'm in a minority. To so many people, driving is just an absolute chore, something to get over and done with as quickly as possible, even better if you have something to distract you as you go along, and heaven forbid anything that makes you too aware of what's going on around you.
Or, a refresher course might show up some of the bad lazy driving habits us no all in my experience drivers claim to have just how unsafe we are, plus, it would weed out the ones not caught in other traffic offences.