It matters little how you learned to drive, Judgement day, aka the driving test, remains the great leveller. Whether you have been drifting the Blomqvist family Saab since you were eight years old, or you have only had a few sweaty-palmed driving school lessons in a Toyota Tazz, nothing prepares you for a moustachioed official, complete with dreaded clipboard, and an alien interpretation of the K53. Fail!
“Sorry officer, my double blind-spot monitoring system is a bit erratic and my Hill Start Assist is totally MIA. Sure, I will pay another small fortune and retake the test in three weeks.”
It was not always this way. My dearly departed grandmother would often recount the day she got her driving licence. The story goes she parked in front of the courthouse in her father’s Austin and went inside to meet with the local authority. Instead of accompanying her on the road for a thorough examination, he sat back, lit a pipe and sent her out solo, telling her to go for a drive and park it out front again. “If you can make it around the block without crashing, you can obviously drive.”
Of course, that was before the notion of traffic even existed. My gran was more likely to encounter an actual zebra than have to deal with a pedestrian crossing. Traffic lights were years away. Average speed cameras existed only in an unpublished Orwell draft. But by the early Eighties, when an extended family member applied for a driving licence, the test had evolved into something a little more objective. After several failed attempts, a permit was finally awarded, though how much that had to do with the bottle of whiskey in the cubbyhole remains a mystery.
Driving, at all levels, becomes easier with familiarity – I have seen timid teenagers turn into mini-Montoyas in mere months. The more often you drive in your home environment, the more comfortable you are with your own traffic. Wait, what? Surely driving in traffic along a boulevard in Sea Point is the same as cruising down one in Santa Monica? Uh, not quite. Having had opportunities to drive in hundreds of cities across four continents, it is amazing how tentatively you approach a busy traffic circle outside Barcelona versus how you dominate the kerbs of the traffic circles back home. You just know your own traffic – you are in tune with the little idiosyncrasies that only locals are aware of. This means you are ready for the school of morning taxis swimming upstream in Sandton but have no clue that motorcyclists expect you to create a virtual lane for them on the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris.
Even if you are at home with steering from the left, traversing rush-hour Rome with its scooterised psychos can bring on a severe case of hives in minutes. Let us not even mention a Bangalore intersection.
And what does all this have to do with taking your driving test? Nothing, it is just that as long as you keep venturing out into the world, from our own Pofadder to Cottonmouth Creek in Texas, you will always be learning to drive.
– Wayne Batty
