Driving – some observations
// September 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal
Those of you that have been following this website for a while will be aware of my, often acerbic, out bursts on the subject of road use and drivers. Normally these out bursts were from a motor cyclist’s perspective but, just recently, I have finally passed my car test and so have been viewing things from a different (and slightly wider) perspective.
This post on the BBC’s website providing some useful tips for daily drivers actually reminded me of something that occurred when driving across Europe. It’s amazing how little difference speeding, lane jockeying and general attempts at going faster makes to your arrival time. In Europe we were driving 100’s of miles at a time and the traffic jams we encountered would literally add a minute or two to our proposed ETA despite spending half an hour travelling at half our previous speed.
I must admit that, for the first week or so I was a very bad (or good depending on your perspective) car driver – very heavy on the throttle, off the line, hard on the brakes and generally being the epitome of someone who’s making the transition from a motorcycle that does 0-60 in 3 seconds to a car that does 0-60 in 3 minutes 
Since I’ve been driving for a short while now I’ve actually settled down and have found, much as I always expected, that driving in a more relaxed fashion doesn’t mean I take any longer to get there. I still drive at or just under / over the speed limit but my transitions are more gradual and it still takes just as long to get where I’m going. The major advantage being that the fuel consumption on the car has dropped from 30 MPG to 40+ which is a pretty nice saving (or about 4 days worth of commute for free!)
Of course I still despair at the twatishness of my fellow road users – but at least I’m doing so from the comfort of a car rather than perched precariously on a 1000cc bike … that said, on the bike I could always over take them!
