Safe Driving Tips Part 1

Every single action or decision, however small or trivial, which you make while driving, leads up to a potential moment where you either live or die, on the road. Want to live? Keep reading...

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This report is in two parts: theory in part one and five critical safe driving rules in part two.

Preface:

I want you to know up front, I’ve dug extremely deep here, and kept both parts rated ‘PG’ - this is definitely safe to show to senior school students.

Don’t worry, even though they already know all the profanity and its syntactical conventions, if you’re a teacher, you won’t have to worry about any of that inappropriateness.

This report is mainly for ordinary drivers, but anyone about to get their licence will hopefully benefit from it as well.

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Setting off

Publishing this report on the 4th of January, thousands of people are hitting the road to return from holidays over the next few days and in the weeks ahead. Or if you’re reading this after the fact, then you’re probably closer to returning to work if you haven’t already.

People in transit are going to make all these choices - when to leave, when to take a break, whether or not to get distracted by their phone, how close to drive to the car in front, doing those basic checks - oil, air, water - or not - whatever.

Mostly, these choices don’t matter. But when they do matter, they really matter. It’s life or death. And you don’t get to choose when they matter. So you had better get it right all of the time. Start by correctly adjusting your mirrors: eliminate blind spots >>

If you make the wrong choices; if you’re driving one-handed, if you’re too close to the car in front, if you’re juggling a coffee when a kid steps out, if you haven’t checked your tyre pressures for a month (or ever) - or you’re just driving in the middle of the night at high speed through kamikaze kangaroo central - you are handing the grim reaper the chalk. 

It’s up to him to step through and sketch your outline on the pavement, but hey, you’re making it kinda easy. Do you really want to paint your own big, red X on the road, and then go stand on it, and just see what happens? 

A sane person would not knowingly do this. And yet thousands of people will cap off their annual holiday by unwittingly behaving in exactly this way. I’m going to show you how not to be one of them, ever.

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Skills versus Tactics

I need to talk to you first about skills and tactics. Driving skills are, for example, emergency braking, skid control, evasive maneuvering. Learn how to do that here >>

Cars are really simple. They only do three things, dynamically: accelerate, brake and steer. There’s a limit to how energetically they can do those things.

Skills are, for example, being able to walk up to that limit, and just feel it. Skills are what racing drivers like Mark Webber have and use at a Jedi level, but they have something else (we’ll get to that). Racing drivers have the ability to exploit the maximum maneuvering capability of the vehicle (accelerate, brake and steer). Advanced driving skills are all about performing seemingly mundane actions in extraordinarily stressful situations, where timelines are tremendously compressed. 

Because it’s an occupational hazard, of being a motoring journalist, I know lots of drivers with really good ‘skills’ resumes - fast lap times, extreme car control capability: whatever. People who can just get behind the wheel in any unfamiliar car and just go, ‘Yeah, there’s the limit.’ I do that, routinely. Fifty metres up the road, I’m kinda good to go, in any car. In a Mitsubishi Mirage or a BMW M3. It’s all the same. Different limits; same skills package.

Unfortunately, many highly skilled drivers just totally suck at driving safely; they completely suck at it. Hold that thought. 

I’m not saying skills are bad - they’re not. Skills rock. They make you better, potentially. But hold that thought, and let’s talk tactics.

You clipped an apex, well done, high-fives for you. But what’s your plan?

Tactics are the preventative choices you make to avoid getting to Defcon 1, and to help you when it does get to that stage. Where are you looking right now, behind the wheel? Do you have both hands on the wheel, in the right spot? Are you situationally aware? Do you know what’s behind and beside you? Have you identified salient potential threats? Do you know what you are going to do if something unexpected happens - if a kid runs out from behind that stopped car? Are you ready? Tactics are planning and preparation. 

Tactics are also logistics. Checking the car over: oil, water, tyre pressures, securing cargo. Are the lights all operational? When are you going to leave and what should you expect leaving at that time? Are you going to manage fatigue by sharing the driving? What options are there if you run late? 

You’ve planned ahead, so there should be no surprises, because tactics trumps skills.

Do you have essential equipment to be prepared for a basic breakdown, potentially in varying conditions: at night, in the rain, on gravel or dirt. (Do you have a torch, gloves, raincoat and a block of wood for the jack to sit on?) It’s the middle of summer in Australia right now, so are you carrying water? Also in Australia right now: Where are the fires, and do they affect your travel? Are you entering an area potentially in the path of changing weather conditions or fire? What are your exit strategies or alternate routes?

And if it’s a choice between skills and tactics, I’ll take tactics, every time. And I’m a ‘skills’ advocate. But if it’s one or the other: Kindly remove all my high-level driving skills and just give me tactics. Because tactics - the choices you make - these are what really moves the needle in terms of survival dynamics out there on the road. 

A mediocre driver making the right choices beats a driving ninja who has made all the wrong choices. Roger Rodas, the professional racing driver who crashed his Porsche with actor Paul Walker on board, had skills, but his tactics were dismal and the result was unsurprising.

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Can you spot her most obvious mistake? Hint: it’s not her watch, but she’s got the wrong time.

Getting it right: choice

On the road, getting the tactics right means you make the right choices, you get home safely and uneventfully, and your passengers won’t even know how hard you just worked to make it happen.

No swerves, no sliding, no hard braking or dangerous speeds, no surprises: it’s exactly how Yoda would drive you home. Break your bad driving habits here >>

Shockingly enough, you must realise that driving safely is going to be hard work. It’s cognitively demanding. It requires diligence and effort. Any idiot can drive a car from A to B while lighting a cigarette and maneuvering from 12 o’clock on the steering wheel, but driving safely is actually difficult - in a good way. It’s something you can aspire to be better at, every time.

The regulators, therefore, and carmakers, should be ashamed of themselves for overlooking this pesky little detail about difficulty. The government wants you to think safe driving is easy, with five quick bullet points. 

That’s all it takes, apparently: Don’t drink, don’t speed, don’t use your phone, don’t forget to wear a seatbelt, and don’t drive when you’re half asleep. That’s it - allegedly.

Speed, fatigue, alcohol, seatbelts and phones - that’s the quantum of official safe driving advice from Australian governments, at a policy level, disgracefully enough. And their subsequent state police and road authorities. It’s advice for morons, frankly, because these things are obvious and doesn’t help anybody actually learn how to be better drivers tactically. 

This is not road safety, it’s marketing, pure and simple. Everybody knows to wear seatbelts. Like, duh.

Does anyone really not know that it’s a great idea to wear a seatbelt? And yet, how many seatbelt ads have you seen lately on TV and highway billboards? 

There are two kinds of people who look at those seatbelt commercials:

Type 1: The vast majority of complying people who are already habitually and  religiously wearing their seatbelts. That ad does not help them, and;

Type 2: The scumbag muppet who does not wear a seatbelt - and is not about to change, because they’re a scumbag. 

There’s no Type 3 because nobody looks at those ads and gasps, “OMG, seatbelts! I had no idea. Thanks. Will do.” Nobody.

Therefore, the government peddles intelligence-insulting, ineffective road safety advice to a target audience that does not exist, and it makes no difference to ambient safety levels. That’s your tax dollars at work, sadly.

Nobody official is giving advice to the vast majority of responsible drivers who might benefit from, and be receptive to, advice about how to drive more safely. This is both absurd and disgraceful, in my view. 

Certainly it’s a blown opportunity because even responsible, relatively safe drivers make mistakes which can kill them and others out on the road. And that is the real tragedy of road crashes - good people killed who shouldn’t have been.

Carmakers are lousy at this too - because they want you to think their cars are just intrinsically safe, as well as effortless to drive. Which is an outright lie. It is, in fact, very easy to drive a safe car very dangerously. Anyone can do it, and lots of people do. You see them every day, and some would argue they now make up the majority of drivers.

So this is all down to you, your skills and tactics, and ultimately your choices. Do you want to use skills or implement tactics?

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What happens if…

Unfortunately, developing advanced driving skills is great, but they’re perishable, and they’re ineffective without an appropriate tactical foundation.

You need to go to a private track to learn these skills, and it’s not a one-off exercise, like being inoculated against polio. Significant training is required. And you need to keep going back and training regularly to keep high-level driving skills current. 

You don’t become a test cricket captain by learning how to hit it for six over the backyard fence - you practice for decades, play every weekend from the age of 10, or thereabouts, and you work hard to be the best.

So, it’s time consuming and expensive - which is fine if you race cars recreationally, but not so hot if you’re a normal family dude or dudette who just wants to get home from holiday safely.

Make no mistake, there is a dark side to skills. High-level driving skills give you the opportunity to drive right up to the limit, any time you want - which is fun on a racetrack, or when you’re go-karting, but it’s abhorrently socially irresponsible on a public road. If you do drive like that, you have reduced your safety margins to zero. There’s no tactic which can save you if anything goes wrong, there’s no plan B or ‘try again’ reset button. It works or you're dead.

For evidence of this, look how often police cars crash, in pursuits. It happens all the time. In NSW the cops stopped reporting the pursuit crash statistics in the annual report because the optics were just so bad. And those police drivers have been trained. Highway patrol officers all have moderately high level driving skills.

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In summary

I’m not saying skills are bad - they’re not - but they carry with them the twin burdens of maintenance and extreme self-restraint. The maintenance burden alone is beyond most ordinary drivers.

Because it is a choice to drive like a moron or not, and it’s also a choice as to how much skill and tactical planning you implement, and how much attention you pay to the task of driving, using the term “accident” needs to change. There are no accidents in road crashes, only causes and effects, typically created by people’s choices. A car accident is just a car crash. Failing to mitigate a risk is a decision, or indecision, which I’ll explain in the next installment.

In part two of this report I’ll give you my five critical rules for safe driving, which anyone can employ immediately, today, starting right now. Plus I’ll give you some insight into just how easy it can be to block the vast majority of driving disasters, and get home safely every time.

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