23 January

The 120-hour driver training for young people now is very interesting, and says a lot about what 'good driving' is. Car enthusiasts will always tell you good driving is something like race car driving - fast, picking the apex of a corner, knowing how to negotiate skids and slides etc. Also often the people who want to replace all road laws with 'driving to the conditions', by which they mean using public roads as their race tracks. Good driving is almost nothing about any of that. Driving is a collective act of negotiating the road with millions of other drivers, of varying abilities and with all sorts of unpredictable factors. It's about paying attention, about a sort of calm assessment of every situation and driving to create the best outcome for everybody on that road, not just yourself. On modern roads, with modern cars and using the speed limits designed into the roads, most of that advanced driver training rubbish is irrelevant. It's not a car race. That's why they shifted to a 'graduated' driver training model, to the 120 hours. To force young learners to have to spend a lot of time with an adult in the car, to hopefully shape the *attitude* to driving much more than the mechanics of it, which don't take that long for anybody to master. George Monbiot captured elements of this in his brilliant piece about how cars make societies nasty places. How they encourage anti-social behaviour in multiple ways. https://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/20/the-anti-social-bastards-in-our-midst/