Bedford Driving Lessons » Driving Comments

Could the UK switch to driving on the right?

admin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:25:08 +0000

Imagine you are the minister in charge of the UK’s roads and you have to switch the country to driving on the right-hand side. How would you do it? A study of Samoa, in the South Pacific, this week might offer some clues. The country is experiencing its first day of driving on the left on Monday, the start of a special two-day bank holiday to ease Samoans into the new regime. What if the UK were to follow? Driving on the right would make trips to the European mainland easier, when taking or hiring a car. And cars with steering wheels on the left could be cheaper. The idea is not as fanciful as it sounds. Although the Department for Transport says it has no plans to change, it did examine such a plan in the late 1960s, two years after Sweden successfully switched to driving on the right. More

Are parents up to date when supervising learners?

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:05:13 +0000

Parents should take a driving lesson or two before teaching their teenagers to drive, says the What Car? Driving School. This would give parents an updated understanding of the Highway Code, and knowledge of the skills required by the new test. The financial crisis has prompted many parents to shun professional driving lessons with driving instructors and play the teacher role themselves, but in the majority of cases parents’ knowledge is out of date. More

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Report shows that private toll roads are not the answer!

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:06:14 +0000

Private toll roads are not a cost-effective answer to traffic problems, the government has been warned. A report by the Campaign for Better Transport said the UK’s only private motorway toll, the M6 Toll, had not significantly cut congestion. Its owners lose tens of millions of pounds a year on the road, near Birmingham, campaigners added. Midland Expressway, which runs the M6 Toll, was approached by the BBC but would not comment on the report. Continue reading the main story Related stories M6 Toll price rises take effect Owners defend M6 Toll price rise M6 Toll road marks fifth birthday The Campaign for Better Transport concluded that the government should not see privately financed schemes as a way out of economic problems. The group argued that journey times on the M6 were only slightly better than before the toll opened nearly seven years ago, and drivers were put off using the road by the charge of £5 per car. It estimated the toll road’s operator was losing more than £25m a year, discouraging potential investors. Campaigners used documents from the Highways Agency, the Transport Select Committee and Midland Expressway to compile the report. Not only had the toll road failed to improve transport in the West Midlands, it concluded, but drivers who paid the toll were not receiving value for money. More

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Drivers supervising learners risk breaking law!

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:01:47 +0000

Drivers are risking fines, disqualification or jail because they do not know the rules on supervising learners, according to the AA. The motoring group’s survey of 19,000 members suggested nearly a quarter did not know it was illegal to use a mobile phone while out with a learner driver. Nearly one in 10 respondents was unaware falling asleep was not allowed. The law states that somebody supervising a learner driver is effectively in control of the car. The AA said that in one case a supervisor was jailed after the learner was involved in a crash that killed two people. It said many learners benefited from time spent with more experienced drivers, but suggested short driving courses for supervisors might be needed. The AA/Populus survey suggested drivers were also breaking the law by drinking, sending text messages, or failing to wear their glasses while on practice runs with learners. Some 23% of respondents did not know they would be breaking the law by using a mobile phone while supervising a learner. And 13% were unaware of the need to wear glasses if they used them when driving themselves, while 9% did not realise that falling asleep in the passenger seat was illegal. A total of 4% of respondents who had supervised learners admitted breaking at least one of these laws. The figure rose to 22% among supervisors aged 21 to 24. More

Some of UK’s cities are most congested in Europe!

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:59:50 +0000

Three gridlocked British cities are among the top ten most congested in Europe, a new study has revealed. A third of cars in London – despite its much heralded congestion charge – as well as Edinburgh and Belfast face gridlock. They are ahead of Paris, Marseilles Luxembourg, Milan and Rotterdam, which just pips Birmingham, when it comes to city congestion. By contrast, if you want fast flowing traffic, head to cities in Spain and Scandinavia where three in every hundred cars – or fewer – face gridlock. The data was compiled by satellite navigation giant TomTom, which tracked the speeds of cars across the Continent. It revealed that the most gridlocked city in Europe is the Belgian capital Brussels, followed by Warsaw and Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) in Poland. They are followed in turn in the top 10 by London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast, Marseilles, Paris and Luxembourg. More

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Too many roads needlessly shut after road accidents!

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:08:42 +0000

The RAC Foundation has called for a review of the length of time roads are shut by serious accidents. It claimed such closures cost the country at least £5 billion every year and accounted for a quarter of all congestion on the roads. And although police should be able to investigate fatal accidents thoroughly, the foundation said traffic should also be kept moving through the sites of any accidents as much as possible. A total of 86 motorways in England were each closed for at least three hours in the last three months of 2008; the entire year saw just 136 fatal crashes on motorways across the UK. The RAC Foundation has issued a report compiled by Irving Yass, a one-time Whitehall transport specialist. Its findings state that the police are instructed to treat fatal crashes as “unlawful killings” until they can prove the contrary. The number of crash investigations is not recorded nationally, neither is the number of prosecutions which result from them, according to the report. More

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Britain’s roads ‘plagued by pointless signs’!

admin — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:18:11 +0000

Language campaigners said today too many pointless signs were springing up next to Britain’s roads. The Plain English Campaign (PEC) – which aims to reduce gobbledegook – said roadsides were filling up with “too much information about nothing”. Officials said drivers were being distracted and money wasted. The group made its complaints as the Highways Agency, a Government agency which manages major roads, said it had decided against planting signs saying “Highways Agency” next to motorways across the country – after spending £76,000 of taxpayers’ money on a “pilot project” in the north west of England. A Highways Agency spokesman said 23 “Highways Agency” signs had been installed alongside the M6 and 11 alongside the A66 in 2005 as part of an experiment. “Police constantly tell motorists not to use mobiles or eat or drink when driving but to concentrate on driving,” said a PEC spokesman. “Yet at the same time there seem to be more and more signs springing up to distract motorists. More

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‘Phantom’ traffic jams explained by boffins!

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 21:52:17 +0000

They appear from out of nowhere, cause chaos for hours on end then disappear without a trace. They are the ‘phantom traffic jams’ and they have the power to completely ruin a bank holiday. Yesterday it was revealed that phantom traffic jams – queues of stationary cars that develop for no apparent reason – can be caused by the actions of just one driver. Dr Eddie Wilson, from the University of Bristol, unveiled research showing that, under the right conditions, one individual’s bad driving can create ‘a traffic tsunami which can affect traffic up to 50 miles away’. Working with a team of fellow mathematicians, Dr Wilson analysed driver behaviour on a 10-mile stretch of the M42, which is one of Britain’s busiest stretches of motorways. While accidents did cause tailbacks, the researchers found that the major cause of congestion was nothing more sinister than sharp braking, unnecessary lane changes and lorries overtaking one another. Under the right conditions, any one of these innocuous events can create the ‘perfect storm’ which Dr Wilson said can lead to ‘traffic chaos’. More

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Drivers are easy target from motoring legislation!

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:29:40 +0000

More than 15 million British drivers are caught committing a motoring offence each year, compared with 4.7 million in 1980 – an astonishing rise of 219 per cent in a generation. It means that – despite there being 15 million more drivers on the roads – a driver today is twice as likely to be caught committing an offence than 30 years ago. In 2008, 3.8 million drivers outside London received parking fines compared with 345,000 in 2000, and the number is rising fast. A further 1.1 million drivers are fined annually for failing to inform the DVLA that their car is off the road – possibly while being repaired or stored – a threat undreamed of before Statutory Off Road Notification (SORN) was unleashed in 1998. Technology is also playing a growing role in the crackdown; CCTV camera-detected motoring fines have spiralled from 642,000 in 2000 to 1.75 million in 2006. No wonder that about 18 per cent of UK motorists now have points on their licence. “You just have to blink to be guilty of something today,” said Paul Watters, the AA’s head of roads and transport policy. More

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£10bn bill to repair Britain’s potholes and crumbling roads!

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:16:18 +0000

They are the bone-jangling, sump-scraping, ankle-twisting scourge of motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. Even The Beatles demonised them in song. And they’ve got much worse. One of the coldest winters in recent memory has resulted in a 50 per cent deterioration in the state of the nation’s roads and a dramatic rise in the number of potholes. The taxpayer faces a repair bill costing hundreds of millions of pounds for the past year alone – adding to £10bn-worth of outstanding pothole repairs. With a month of winter remaining and the full extent of the damage still being assessed, it is estimated that the total number of craters in Britain’s 246,000 miles of secondary routes (those that aren’t motorways or A-roads) has risen to 1.6 million – an increase of 700,000 in two years. The Local Government Association, which represents local authorities in England and Wales, has written to the Department of Transport seeking £100m of emergency funds to carry out the most urgent repairs. North Yorkshire County Council proposes a 2.94 per cent rise in council tax to help fix the problem. With one pothole to be found every 120 yards, it will take an estimated 15 years to remedy the problem. David Weeks, director of the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), claims that Britain’s network is in danger of sinking to “Third World” levels. The short cold snap of 2009 resulted in a 30 per cent increase in the number of potholes, costing £47m in compensation claims for injury and damage. This year’s sustained freeze is expected to produce even more alarming figures. “Just go and look at any road and you will see,” said Mr Weeks. “For too long the network in Britain has been at the bottom of the political agenda. Local authorities have concentrated on siphoning off money from the roads budget to pay for vote-winning services such as education. But it is like buying new furniture for your house before you fix the leaking roof.” More

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20mph zones not enforceable says Police!

admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:39:58 +0000

A police force has criticised the use of 20 mile an hour zones, saying they cannot work without speed bumps and other traffic calming measures to force drivers to slow down. Oxfordshire County Council has recommended cutting the limit on at least 24 of the town’s roads. However, police said that the scheme would only reduce motorists’ average speeds by two miles per hour. David Paull, a Thames Valley Police spokesman, said the new restriction was unnecessary. “Simply putting a different number at the end of a road and relying on enforcement alone to achieve compliance is not the answer,” he said. “Any 20mph limits should only be sought where there is a need to protect residents, particularly children and the road is either engineered to encourage compliance or the mean speed now is 24mph and below. “We feel that additional traffic-calming or engineering would be required to reduce speeds to within the proposed 20mph limit. More

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Traffic schemes cause rat-runs rather easing congestion!

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:21:43 +0000

Road schemes aimed at easing traffic congestion have resulted in ‘rat-runs’ around British towns and allowed motorists to speed, an analysis of Highways Agency projects has shown. Around £1 billion a year is being spent on road schemes which are not working, the Campaign for Better Transport said. The Agency not only relied on inaccurate forecasts of future traffic patterns but also underestimated the impact on air quality, noise and greenhouse gas emissions, the Campaign claimed. It examined four recent schemes: the A6 Great Glen Bypass in Leicestershire; the A650 Bingley Relief Road, West Yorkshire; the A11 Roundham Heath to Attleborough in Norfolk and the A27 Polegate Bypass in East Sussex. Based on an inspection of the Highways Agency’s own evaluation of the schemes, the Campaign said the projects failed to ease traffic congestion. Instead it found the traffic increased significantly on all the roads, triggering demands for yet more bypasses. Residents complained that far from relieving villages, new problems had been created by drivers taking shortcuts. Where traffic had fallen, cars were now driving too fast, they said. More

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Is the driving test and driver education out of date?

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:42:41 +0000

Driver education is not something to which many pay much attention after we have passed our driving test. At least, we don’t until many years later when our teenagers approach adolescence and activities that cause parents to have nightmares – sex, drink, drugs and driving. Our concern is valid because young, inexperienced male drivers cause and suffer a disproportionate number of crashes and fatalities. Some 8,000 are killed each year in Europe alone. The European Commission and the Driving Standards Agency in the UK are both attempting to address this. The EC Road Safety section created a Training and Education Expert Group onto which I was co-opted, because of my dual expertise in driving (British and European saloon car champion in circuit racing) and performance coaching (author of the best-selling book in the field). The other eight members are all driving and education experts from various European countries, mainly Scandinavia. Our findings – to be reported soon – will recommend that the higher levels of what is known as the “GDE (goals for driver education) matrix” are properly addressed along with the more basic elements of car control and traffic skills. The higher levels involve the attitude of the learner and how it affects their driving, encompassing aggression, distraction, showing-off, competitiveness and other testosterone-fuelled behaviour. The only learning method that specifically addresses these issues in combination with driving skills is performance coaching, which aims to eliminate the mental and emotional obstacles to learning – and performance – in any activity. The UK Driving Standards Agency controls the examiners of both the instructors and the public, and so sets the standards. Recently the DSA circulated an elaborate public consultation paper, but it attracted little response. The DSA is influenced by the police driving schools and by the likes of the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM), RoSPA, BSM and the AA, most of which still slavishly follow the old police driving principles. They also used the police manual Roadcraft for many decades – and herein lies the problem. The primary function of the police is to maintain law and order. Driving is secondary, so within their ranks they have little or no learning methodology – nor do they have up-to-date motoring expertise. The police driving system and teaching methods remain extremely rigid and prescriptive. They are passed from one generation to the next with little change, with the result that their teaching methods are obsolete and inappropriate for the public. Some of what they preach is redundant because cars have changed enormously since Roadcraft was written in 1934. Because the police believed that they knew best, they never saw the need to seek knowledge from elsewhere. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. And since retired police drivers hold key roles in the IAM and RoSPA and other parts of the driving establishment, they all ended up scratching each others’ backs. More

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Elderly drivers could benefit from driving simulators!

admin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:20:50 +0000

Several tragic accidents involving older drivers in recent years have focused the public’s attention on the possible risks posed by elderly drivers. Currently about 500,000 of the 30 million licensed drivers in the U.K. are over 65. That number will grow in the years ahead. The UK demographic shift is now in full progress. By 2020, people of 50 and over will comprise half the adult population. Especially for drivers 85 and older, there will more than a quadruple in the years to 2020. The public, and policymakers are expressing a growing concern that the nation’s roads and motorways are filled with greater numbers of older drivers. More

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Drivers splash out more on car upgrades!

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:54:40 +0000

Some 6.4 million motorists have already made upgrades to their cars this year such as recharging air conditioning units, fitting better exhaust systems and even splashing out on alloy wheels to make their cars as saleable as possible in the future. A rise in used car values has sparked the trend as more and more invest in their beloved motors in the knowledge that resale values will remain high in the future. David White, customer services director at Kwik Fit, said: “Whereas money once spent on used cars might have been viewed as ‘dead money’, second hand car owners are increasingly more prepared to spend money to keep their car in good condition as they are more likely to get what they shell out back when they sell it. More

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Electric cars could lose their value massively!

Miss-use of Satnav causing chaos on Roads!

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:09:17 +0000

The IAM says business drivers using satellite navigation should keep a map for backup to avoid dangerous situations on the roads.Many people in rural areas will have seen or heard of lorry drivers getting stuck in narrow lanes after blindly following their satnav’s cheerful instructions. If the UK were to introduce ‘road trains’ (articulated 60 tonne mega-liners stretching up to 82ft), as has been discussed recently, these incidents could be much more serious says the IAM. A recent survey said that 20% of women and 30% of men have blindly followed a satnav into the middle of a field, and Network Rail has experienced damage to railway bridges and level crossing collisions as a result of drivers’ failure to use their initiative. Peter Rodger, IAM Chief Examiner, said: “Satnavs can be a real aid to road safety, providing the driver already has an idea of the route. More

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Classic cars are being scrapped!

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:08:52 +0000

Earlier this year the Scrappage Incentive Scheme was introduced in a bid to reduce greenhouse gases and stimulate new car sales, but in the process many classics are being part-exchanged and scrapped. Once a car is signed over to a dealer under the scheme, its future lies in the scrapyard, with no chance of a reprieve. Classic Show manager Andy Rouse explains: “While the scrappage scheme might be an effective way of stimulating new car sales it’s likely that some cars finding their way into the scheme might actually be worth more than the scrappage value offered – and not just in monetary value. It’s definitely worth anyone who’s considering using the scheme to take a close look at prices on classic car related websites first. When you look at the real environmental issue (that the scheme is ‘sold’ on), the truth is that most classic cars get driven no more than a few times a year, are absolutely cherished by their owners and kept in tip-top condition. Despite what the Government might intimate, Classic Cars today are not the cause of global warming! More

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Who can legally getaway with speeding?

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:53:05 +0000

We know the emergency services can speed and jump red lights when they are attending a 999 call, but who else can get away with speeding? Fines are issued automatically but police do have discretion When consultant obstetrician Dr Sherif Abdel-Fattah got a speeding ticket in August for marginally exceeding the limit while rushing to the aid of a woman with severe bleeding he expected the fine would be quickly overturned. He had a letter from his hospital trust confirming the life-threatening nature of the early morning call out, but it took until last Friday for Avon and Somerset Police to relent and cancel the fine. “The only people who are statutorily allowed to speed are drivers of the emergency service vehicles when going about proper business,” says Chris Hunt Cooke, chairman of the Magistrates’ Association’s road traffic committee. But the law allows a “special reasons” defence for everybody else. The typical “speeding ticket” these days is a fixed penalty notice, issued automatically after being caught on camera. It represents a conditional offer for the driver, who can refuse and instead face prosecution at a magistrates’ court where they can argue their case. More

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Traffic calming is now bad for environment!

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:33:43 +0000

Edmund King, the motoring organisation’s president, has also voiced fears that the growth of 20 mph zones could be environmentally damaging even if they do promote road safety. According to Mr King, there is an environmental cost with carbon emissions likely to be higher at lower speeds because cars are normally driven in a lower gear, and higher revs pump out more emissions as the engine works harder. According to Mr King, some of the 20 mph zones have been introduced without any real thought being given to their impact on CO 2 and pollution. More

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More 20 mph zones planned!

Fears over new powers for police to give drivers £60 on-the-spot fines!

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:23:58 +0000

Police cannot be trusted to hand out on-the-spot fines for some motoring offences, magistrates warned today. They claim officers will ‘misuse’ the powers and force drivers to pay the fixed penalty notices when they have done nothing wrong. In a scathing attack, the Magistrates Association said that by giving police powers to hand out fines for careless driving, innocent motorists will be penalised while some guilty drivers could avoid jail terms. The Government is planning to give police new powers to hand out £60 fines and three penalty points on their licence to motorists guilty of careless driving. Currently, offenders are prosecuted in the courts where they can face a fine of up to £5,000 and up to nine points on their licence. But police leaders want more powers to issue the fixed penalty notices as it frees up officers time as they are not bogged down with paperwork for court. The number of on-the-spot fines issued by police has risen sharply under Labour – largely due to the introduction of the ‘penalty notice for disorder’ which was introduced in 2004. More

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