Let learners on the motorway: it will prepare them for the hell ahead
Like playing the piano or speaking a foreign language, driving a motor vehicle is a skill for which some of us have a natural aptitude – others, not so much. It is also the only thing many of us do on a regular basis that could transform us in an instant into a killer, or a corpse. No one ever died of a duff note or a bungled subjunctive.
Even so, before attempting a tricky technical exercise – playing a Chopin nocturne, holding a conversation in a tongue not their own – most people would feel inclined to put in a spot of practice. Yet as drivers, we all have one thing in common. We pass the test that qualifies us to drive unsupervised on a motorway at higher speeds than we have (legally) reached before, without ever having had the opportunity to master the necessary techniques.
As soon as you venture on to the motorway network, the consequences of that curious lacuna in the current driving test become evident in a myriad alarming forms: the would-be Lewis Hamiltons who overtake at a speed fit to bust the sound barrier, only to weave back across three lanes a few seconds later to take the next exit; the characters who reckon they have the motorway equivalent of an access-allareas backstage pass, and zoom up the hard shoulder to avoid a traffic jam; the motorists who trundle smugly down the centre lane at 50mph (Look, officer! I’m not breaking the law, unlike all the reckless types undertaking me in the inside lane …) What is the irresistible attraction of the centre lane, I wonder. Is it some atavistic British attachment to the Middle Ground?
I could go on: we all have our own motorway horror stories (and of course we are all occasionally guilty of perpetrating them, too. It took me three goes to pass my test. When I made my first nervous excursions on to a motorway, my mother’s habit, in her role as navigator, of murmuring, “Turn left back there, darling,” did nothing to endear me to my fellow motorists.)
Now the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, has acknowledged what all his predecessors have apparently failed to notice since the first bit of the M1 was opened in 1959: that sending novice drivers on to superfast multi-lane highways is a recipe for reckless Mr Toadish poop-poopery (or, just as hazardous, nervous dithering in an environment fatally intolerant of timidity). From next year, a change in the law will allow learner drivers on to motorways in a dual-controlled car with a qualified instructor. Along with the extension of the driving test to assess a driver’s ability to follow sat-nav instructions, it is a welcome, if oddly belated, incursion of joined-up thinking into our national driving habits.
The wearing of hi-vis jackets by children on school trips, recently deprecated by the chief inspector of schools, has inspired a brisk correspondence to The Telegraph.
In Greenwich we have a haunting variant of the phenomenon. Most days I meet a posse of tinies, taking the air along the riverfront under the supervision of several grown-ups. The children are shackled by webbing straps around the waist to a kind of leash arrangement, so they have to shuffle along at a uniform pace, with no opportunity to investigate the world around them. Give them each a little spade, and the resemblance to a diminutive chain gang would be complete. READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion