Welcome back to our EDT Lesson series where we’ve been helping Alanna get on the road. Alanna is now halfway through her EDT lessons. She’s nailed the basics of driving, her confidence is growing with every lesson and she’s ready to move on to busier settings and more complex driving situations. 

Last week we covered EDT Lesson 5 – Correct Positioning for Complex Situations), where she learned how to maintain the correct road position in a variety of driving situations, like navigating bends and when using roundabouts. She also covered EDT Lesson 6 – Anticipation and Reaction, and she learned the importance of reading the road, scanning for potential dangers and knowing how to respond to when they happen. 

Lesson 7 – Sharing the Road

We started Alanna’s driving lessons on quieter streets to give her time to master the basics in a safe environment with few obstacles or distractions. Now that she’s comfortable with all the basics, she’s ready for some more challenging settings. 

Learning how to safely share the road is a key driving skill. For today’s lesson we moved to busier streets to give her experience of navigating obstacles, like parked cars, and to help her get used to interacting with other road users, like pedestrians and cyclists. 

Pedestrians can take chances when using the road, so she needs to be able to anticipate and respond to this. She also needs to make sure to check her mirrors regularly to watch for cyclists, who may come up along the the inside of her car. In addition, she will need to know how to safely give way to emergency vehicles. 

In this lesson, Alanna learned how to park on roads with other road users and how to safely pass parked cars.  

Parked cars reduce the available road space and learning how to negotiate them is a key driving skill. Today Alanna encountered a row of cars parked next to a busy park. Reducing her speed, she checked her mirrors for any hazards, signaled to move out and positioned the car just left of the centre line, allowing an oncoming car to pass before checking her mirrors one last time and moving out past the parked vehicles. She made sure to keep a safe distance when passing them (3 to 4 feet). Once she’d passed them, she turned her indicator off and resumed the correct road position. 

She also practiced entering and exiting junctions and who has the right of way and when. At one junction, her view was blocked by a parked car, and she used MSPSL (Mirror, Signal, Position, Speed, Look) from her earlier training and edged the car out slowly, continuing to observe either side and looking out for cyclists and pedestrians before making the turn. 

Lesson 8 – Driving Safely Through Traffic

In this lesson Alanna got more experience of busy road conditions and learned how to interact with other road users. 

Defensive driving was a key focus of this lesson which involves 

• Staying aware of what’s happening around you 

• Anticipating hazards in good time  

• Making informed decisions to protect yourself and others. 

Alanna watched out for potential risks, like pedestrians stepping out from behind parked cars or other drivers not concentrating, and she kept a safe distance from other drivers at all times. Knowing the correct stopping distance is an important part of this.  

If you’re unsure of your stopping distance, a good way to test it is to pick a fixed point, like a tree. When the car in front of you passes this point say, “Only a fool breaks the two second rule”. If you pass the same point before you finish the sentence, you should adjust your speed. 

It was a rainy day today, and the perfect opportunity to learn how the safe stopping distances need to be adjusted in bad weather conditions. The 2 second rule is extended to 4 seconds or more in rain. Alanna made sure to allow extra distance to compensate for the bad weather. Safe stopping distances should be adjusted even more for conditions like snow, ice or fog. 

End of lesson review

At the end of the lesson, Rod and Alanna had a chat about her progress so far. 

Here’s what Alanna had to say about her seventh and eighth lessons:

This weeks’ lessons went well. I drove around the driving test route area. I also got to drive around the town, and it was great to get a feel for how to drive in the busy town traffic. We also did a few manoeuvres like the 3-point turn and a few hill starts which was great to practice. 

Here’s how Rod feels Alanna is progressing:

Everything went great on Monday with Alanna, we worked on the turnabout, we also did so work on her reaction to hazards and drove around the driving test area. We also did some more work on Mirror, Signal, Mirror, Manoeuvre, (M,S,M,M). She’s progressing well and I’m looking forward to the next lessons. 

Remember:

Learner drivers aged 17-40 can get 12 EDT Lessons for €545 AND if you have an AXA car insurance policy and you could get up to €400 off your car insurance if you complete your lessons within 12 months. Read more now on the AXA Website.