Fortunately I - mostly - recongnized I was inexperienced and it had been drilled into my by my dad that cars could be very dangerous - and to constantly be aware of other cars because any one of them could turn out to be an idiot.

And that little nugget of advice is what has saved my bacon more than anything else. I always play the “what’s the dumbest thing that driver could do” game, and now with so many more disctrations easily available it’s even more important. 22 years ago all we had to contend with were newspapers, portable shavers, makeup artists, radio fiddlers…

It’s easy to just lump all the idiots as cell phone abusers but….it’s true! Just last week someone moved over into the lane next to mine regardless of the fact it was already occupied. Brakes were jammed, horns were blown….and the cause of it all exhibited zero recognition anything at all had happened. As I passed they were still on the (hand held) cellphone, paying (obviously) more attention to the GPS than the vehicles around them.

I have gotten to the point that if possible I choose my route based on my perceived percentages of encountering idiots. Some intersections and stretches of roadway just require a larger amount of attention than I believe too few people are capable of providing, so, as an extreme extension of the ‘best way to survive an accident is not to have one’ I just go another way, or use another lane that is potentially less chaotic.

I wonder if we have to even learn driving education right from elementairy school? At least some pedestrians rights things to do and to not do. Maybe we should review some old educationnal movies like “The talking car” http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=4450815203286280588&ei=FAqZSLa5EYTSrALNxsU5&q=the+talking+car&hl=fr

Most of my driving life has been spent driving rear wheel iron from 1967-1980 and as long as I had a good set of tires and showed some basic sense about road conditions I rarely had a problem. I didn’t have ABS, traction control or any of that stuff and I did fine. I still don’t have any of that along with millions of other people.

I agree that driver’s ed is a joke and has been as long as I can remember and I started driving in 1979. The school budget kept getting cut with the results you’d expect from gutting something like driver’s ed.

Driving in bad weather: I lived in Lexington,Ky for 21 years and the first thing I learned and quickly is that people will not stay off of seriously bad roads in the winter time. There seems to be this need to be able to tell war stories about how they were “caught out in the storm” when you know it wasn’t true about why they were out in the mess. Then there are employers like mine who make us come in even when the roads are dangerous.

People with four wheel or all wheel drive were the worst. You’d see them stuck in the median on New Circle Road or stuck in places like the exit from New Circle onto Harrodsburg Road. They’d drive too fast for the conditions thinking their 4WD made them invincible. Fortunately, in later years, their airbags saved them.

As far as the blogger’s first two paragraphs are concerned, I could not agree more. In my opinion for whatever that’s worth if anything, I think safety features have reached their useful limit in the face of very inadequate driver education. I’m sick of encountering people multi-tasking in their vehicles, especially the texters. I hope I never meet any of these people again on a snowy icy road!