Everybody complains about others driving careless; How many really know how well they drive themselves?
I’ve been watching a close friend of mine(who has the habit of complaining of other people on the road) while he’s driving, I used to get this recurring feeling that he is doing a bad job himself, but I didn’t want to tell him so, as I know it is difficult to convince people on such things. L’me list out the things I found wrong with his driving:
Poor road sense: He has this habit of sticking to the right side of the road, irrespective of the speed of the car. Even in moderately crowded city conditions(ie Bangalore), if you are driving at speed, say, lower than 40KMPH, better you stay to the left and let others go. That is some simple common sense.
Trying to do things others do: Like sports, you have to have a nice timing to do some real fast driving through a
packed traffic. You may see that Hep youngster clearing the gaps at a good speed and comfortably, but are you good enough to do that? After all how often do you see people doing that?
Wait till you really feel like you can do that, before trying such a thing.
Late use of Breaks: If there’s a truck in front of your car, there could be another one in front of that one as well, and any of them could stop at any odd second. In a city no one can help sudden-breaking, so better keep a decent gap, press the break at the right time so that you get enough time to stop your car.
Reluctance to look at the mirrors: I don’t know when mirrors went out of fashion in the town, so that people just stopped looking at it. We got to do so before going to the right to overtake, and the same about stopping the car on the road. If there’s a car behind you and close, you can’t expect him to guess, but let him clear you, before you stop or let him know that you are getting into the right with an intention of over-taking.
So the first thing my friend got to do is to realize how good or bad a driver he is, instead of thinking that everybody else on the road are bad or ugly.(It cannot be so). He got to develope a proper discipline, a habit of good driving, before trying to imitate that youngster inside the 90KMPH car which went down MG road during a crowded saturday evening.