City Driving and You

DMV offices are located in cities, so one very crucial driving skill to master is driving in cities. Still, many driving students make terrible mistakes when they drive in city streets. Here is an article I wrote about this subject.

City Driving Errors That Fail Many Drivers on Their Road Test

Driving in a city can be much more complicated than driving on a freeway. There are traffic lights, pedestrians, slowing cars, turning cars, and many other factors to watch out for. But the road test is done in a city and not entirely on a freeway. Many driving students practice some separate driving maneuvers, but they don't know how to combine them into good city driving. That makes some city driving mistakes repeat more often than others.

One big mistake is done with crosswalks. Many driving students cannot handle a crosswalk, especially if it's positioned outside an intersection. They don't know how to recognize a crosswalk when they see it and how to treat the crossing pedestrians. Crosswalk mistakes are very harmful for the test, and usually end up as test failures.

Intersections also cause many problems to student drivers. Sometimes they are so concentrated on their driving that they forget to check side traffic on intersections, or worse, don't notice traffic lights or stop signs. If a serious enough error occurs, the examiner marks a critical error and the test is over.

Heavy traffic is a part of city driving. At some parts of the day traffic is just crawling to its destination. There are some drivers who can't handle that. They become nervous or angry, which affects their driving. If it happens to an examinee during a driving test and he starts driving like a beginner, the examiner might notice that and end the test.

Parked cars are a nightmare of every driver. Sometimes it's an opening door, on other times it's an ignorant driver who doesn't look back when exiting the parking. During the road test the driver has to be extremely cautious, or something could happen, something that could ruin his test and send him home to wait.

City driving is a matter of practice. Every driving student should get some good city driving practice before the test. A good practice does not consist of just going out to the city, but driving with a guide that explains the minor details of city driving, details that can change the test result from fail to pass.

You can find a good guide at the Pass Your Road Test area of my site. There is also a free course offered on that page with more driving test mistakes and tips.

Hope you find it useful.

Yours,
Nadav

nadavs