Driving Skills and Why Education is Required to Build Them

Any adult that has been driving for a long time is likely to have very developed skills. These skills take many years to foster and, unfortunately, some of them come as the result of having been in accidents. Even with this type of experience, however, it’s not guaranteed that a driver is going to really learn skills that will help them to avoid bad situations in the future.

Why Experience Is Different than Education

When you’re learning through experience with no education to back it up, you’re learning in the midst of chaos. You might learn to avoid collisions when you’re merging by avoiding a couple of bad accidents, but you’ll never learn the basic skills that could prevent near misses from ever happening. You might learn how to stop without locking up your brakes by having a few close calls, but you’ll never learn about braking distances, escape routes and other collision avoidance skills without training.

In short, the skills that people build up by driving in the absence of instruction are undisciplined and without foundation. They may have worked in one or two situations, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the equivalent of skills that are taught by instructors, which give the foundational skills to avoid a multitude of bad situations. Experienced instructors—I’ve been instructing drivers education since 1984—can blend real world experience with technical knowledge that allows students to get the best of both worlds without the risk to life and limb.

Advanced Skills

There are skills that are very basic—parking, right of way knowledge, etc.—and there are advanced skills. Like any training for intense situations, the advanced skills that drivers learn at Bill Rehill’s Driving School combine real world experience with foundational driving skills, but are designed to help students avoid some of the most dangerous situations on the road.

For instance, how do you deal with a driver in a lane next to you who appears to be drunk? What do you do if your car starts sliding on snow or ice? What do you do if your visibility is suddenly reduced because of rain or water splashed up from the road? When is slowing down the best safety option and when does it create a hazard? Plenty of complex situations that require instructions to learn how to handle. Learning them in real life is very risky and, without at least some foundation, the reason that a teen survives such situations might be nothing more than luck.

Education allows students to be ready for situations that they, hopefully, will never have to face in real life. When they do, their training will generally kick in and they won’t have to think about how to handle the situation. When you consider how quickly deadly situations on the road can develop, it’s easy to see how a few seconds of hesitation

before taking an action can turn deadly. With the right training, however, a teen stands a better chance of surviving, and learning from, dangerous situations on the roads.

At Bill Rehill’s Driving School we put our students in many driving situations. From rotaries, to highway driving, traffic, parking lots, parallel parking, driving in multi lanes traveling in the same direction (with cars parallel parked on the right) as well as merging lanes. Al though we put our students in many situations we can not put them in every driving situation they will encounter in life. We give them a solid foundation in which they will be better prepared to handle any challenging situation that they will encounter after the student received their license.