If you were to get a group of friends together and asked them all the same question: ‘what is the worst driving behaviour that you encounter on the roads?’ I’m sure that you would get a range of different answers back. We all have a particular bugbear because lets face it, if you drive for long enough, you will see some poor behaviour on the roads at some point.
Some of this bad driving can be put down to driver error; after all, we are all human! But then other behaviour is just thoughtless and avoidable. With this in mind, it was interesting to see a survey recently from road safety organisation GEM Motoring Assist which revealed the ten things that motorists view as the most dangerous practises on motorways.
The top ten is as follows:
1. Tailgating
2. Driving while using a mobile phone
3. Driving in the middle lane when the left hand lane is empty
4. Changing lanes without adequate observations or signals
5. Driving on the hard shoulder to avoid traffic
6. Entering a motorway from a slip road without adequate observations or signals
7. Driving too slowly
8. Speeding
9. Use of the outside lane by LGV’s
10. Stopping on the hard shoulder when there is no emergency.
No surprise that tailgating is at the top of the list – pretty much all drivers find it highly irritating but that doesn’t stop a number of drivers from doing it. Worse still, it’s not an accident, it is an active decision that the driver has made; as are all of the top three.
The thing that strikes me is that on the motorway I have seen pretty much all of the offences stated in the top ten, and many of them on a fairly regular basis. These things clearly offend and aggravate but they are common so it begs the question: of the drivers polled, how many have also committed the offences that they identify as the worst behaviours?
It’s a bit of a cliché, but the mantra for drivers must be: if you don’t like seeing it, don’t do it yourself!
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