Parents may not know what’s best on the road
Learner drivers could give Mom and Dad some tips, Lorraine Sommerfeld writes.
Every time Mother Nature freaks out and sends our streets and highways into chaos, I wish for a learner driver to be in every passenger seat. They’re the only ones who have read a rules of the road handbook in recent memory and are still scared of making a mistake lest they flunk a test.
Right now, parts of the country are flooded; where I am, Wizard of Oz-calibre winds brought down hydro wires and snuffed out traffic signals last week. Traffic chaos.
Every starter driver knows you treat failed traffic lights as a fourway stop. I’ve learned most of the other drivers where I live have no idea what to do, so they do the only thing that makes sense: they sail into unmetered intersections at normal speed, no doubt with their eyes shut like they’re playing double dutch and are hoping the skipping rope keeps turning.
Bad habits creep in over time in our driving, much as they do in everything we do. Skills deteriorate, our physical health changes, car technology is leapfrogging into the future and we get increasingly complacent. The problem is driving is a team sport and your actions affect everything around you.
I was caught a few kilometres from home when incredible winds sent hydro poles tilting and wires crashing down. Police were positioning cars as fast as they could as a warning, but traffic was clogging every street with nobody bothering to look up and see the wires threatening to come down.
(Side note: If a live wire lands on your car, stay in it. If you absolutely have to get out, jump out of the car, land on both feet, keep both feet together and do not touch any part of the car. Trudge away from the car keeping your feet as much on the ground as possible.)
As wires whipped overhead, the people I was surrounded by looked like they’d be more upset about damage to their clear coat than getting electrocuted. As I tried to keep clear of impending doom, car after car cut into the berth I left, more intent on joining the multi-lane cross-section of the lemming track meet taking place at the intersection.
Random thought: there can be no better sign that traffic circles are safer and more useful than stoplights then when the power goes out.
Police can’t be on point duty at every intersection in the event of massive outages and civilians are not encouraged to seize the day. Why should they have to be? We can all work a four-way stop, right? I find the second you get an intersection with four or more lanes of traffic each way is the moment nobody can count. I watched one old bird go whistling through a darkened intersection, oblivious to the state of chaos left in her wake. There is a rule for nearly every “what if.” The problem is nobody has read the rules since the day they were tested on them.
Unsurprisingly, emergency vehicles were out in force. So were drivers who seemed to think flashing lights and sirens must signify “make them wait, same as I have to.” New drivers can recite chapter and verse that you have to pull to the right and stop unless you are on a divided roadway. A row of construction cones does not mean it’s a divided roadway. One fire truck actually did need to come into the oncoming lanes to get around the stubborn blocks of traffic, but there was still some yahoo a few cars back honking furiously at those of us who’d got out of the way.
Learner drivers come to full stops at stop signs rather than considering them “stoptional.” Learner drivers are more apt to stop on an amber light than gas it; they don’t enter intersections on stale greens; they take a corner into the correct lane of traffic. Are they green in a thousand other ways? Absolutely. It’s why I don’t necessarily want them in the driver’s seat in times of trouble, but I saw far too many people who could have used a keen newbie in the instructor’s seat.
Years ago, a friend was complaining that her kid was making her nuts, correcting every driving error she made. She was also convinced her kid was wrong. “I made a left into the far right lane. Nobody was in it and it’s the lane I needed. My kid told me I broke a traffic law. Can you believe it?” Um, yeah. Her kid was right. Let your new driver point out everything you are doing wrong — it’ll be the swiftest, fastest brush-up on every traffic rule you’ve ever learned.