Driving

Breaking my streak of 11 blog posts on the day of my driving lesson… I had a driving lesson yesterday. Strangely enough I feel that my driving is getting worse, I don’t think it actually is getting any worse I am just getting more confident and trying to do more things at once, at which point Kev steps in (literally) with the foot break. Interesting experience today as we were driving round in the pouring rain, it was quite disturbing at first as the windscreen wipers were distracting, however once I got over that I was more or less ignoring them. The main issue I had was large blobs of rain obscuring entire cars, again once I got use to checking a bit more carefully I got over that too. ...

Had quite a break between lessons this time, found it much harder to get into the frame of mind after an 8 day break, came back quickly enough. Kev has been trying to get me talking through what I am doing to improve my concentration and awareness of the situation, I am still struggling to get junctions and roundabout quite right, I still tend to come up to the junction to fast not giving myself enough time to get into position, change gear down and look. ...

20 hours of driving lessons completed now, and Kev and I took the time to go through the Driver’s Record that the Driving Standards Agency provides people who book a theory test for the first time. The Driver’s Record is broken down into twenty driving skills and four other skills related to car ownership. You can read more about the Driver’s Record on direct.gov. Each of the 20 driving skills are rated between 1 and 5, where 1 is Introduced and 5 is independent without prompts from the driving instructor. In total I have one of the skills at level 5, three at level 4, twelve at level 3 none at level 2, two at level 1 and there are two that I have not looked at yet (emergency stops and parking). I am pleased with the progress I have made although I expect I will need another 40 hours of lessons before I will be close to being able to take my practical test. ...

Well roundabouts went well today, I am still not anywhere near confident on them but I was bringing my speed down most of the time. I must admit I am itching to get out in a car again to practice more. I will have to wait as my two weeks of regular lessons have come to an end, could only book one lesson next week as Kev is off to Rivercamp on Friday, and has lessons the rest of the week. ...

If you are following me on Twitter you will have seen that Peacehaven was very wet this morning, of course by the time I have left my basement office it was bright sunshine. I was glad of it as we went off towards Shoreham and then onto the A27 to head back towards Newhaven. It seems that driving fast and overtaking comes fairly easily to me, perhaps being on my bike has provided me with practical practice. ...

I don’t have much time to blog today, so it is fortunate that much of what I described yesterday was practiced today. It was a narrower road and it was much harder to get it right. I have got the procedure down in my head now though, will need more practice but I am making progress. Tomorrow is “driving a bit faster” which should be fun, not to0 fun mind… I am not one for speeding… intentionally. ...

Today’s lesson was very distinctly split into two, Kev allowed me to drive off from work in Hove much to the amusement of the caretakers who didn’t know that I couldn’t drive. From there Kev took me through the area between the Old Shoreham Road (A270) and the coast road (A259) drilling the MSM-PSL junction procedure I had been taught previously. I have been having trouble linking up the stopping at junctions and starting off again, basically I spent too long at a junction that in some cases I shouldn’t have to stop at. ...

Spent some more time driving round Woodingdean, Kev went through who has priority in which situations. For example if an obstruction is on your side of the road then the oncoming traffic has priority, the situation can obviously be reversed if the obstruction is on the other side of the road the you have priority. I have been drawing out some of the diagrams from Kev’s folder of pictures, to save anyone else the trouble I have included the source files here for anyone to play with all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. ...

Third driving lesson went really well, Kev taught me about hill starts specifically if you are going up the hill I need a little more gas than and keep the clutch just above the biting point when on the flat. When going down the hill the clutch can be fully depressed and thus the accelerator isn’t needed, you can basically just roll down the hill - must remember to bringing the clutch up once I am moving as engine braking is actually quite substantial. ...

So today went well, I am starting the cement the moving off procedure in my head now and I got a bit more comfortable breaking (which is always good when moving at anything above stopped). I edited the previous post with corrections from the previous day. Most notably I forgot about checking the position of the mirrors before putting my seat belt on and the hand brake should be the second thing to check after getting in the car. ...