Driving Development Driver's Handbook: Index
During your lifetime you'll probably clock up a total of a few years of driving. How safely and enjoyably you to spend all that time depends on the effectiveness of your driving performance. The purpose of Driving Development is to help you to become more and more effective at the wheel.
Driving Development came about as the result of research that set out to answer the question: What characterises effective driving? In other words, what do those people who consistently drive effectively actually do, specifically, in order to achieve that?
The research looked at drivers who demonstrate their effectiveness: winning racing and rally drivers, police traffic patrol drivers, chauffeurs, top driver trainers and high-mileage business drivers with accident-free records. While the styles and techniques of these drivers may differ outwardly, the effectiveness of their driving performance is grounded in a common set of principles. These principles are presented and explored in Driving Development Workshops and Coaching, and in this Driver's Handbook.
We all have the potential to be more effective drivers, more of the time. By developing your driving performance you will:
In short, you'll always have a nice drive.
This handbook complements Driving Development Workshops and Coaching. It provides information and references, and guides you through a process of self-development of your driving performance.
It's divided into the following parts:
Each level of the structure of effective driving is then presented in the next three parts.
explores the influence that your personal state of mind and body has on your driving performance, and offers advice on optimising your personal state, including:
It also encourages you to consider how effectively and efficiently you control the vehicle, including:
Each part of the Driver's Handbook is divided into chapters. Each chapter is divided into fairly small blocks of text with plenty of headings so you can skim the text quickly and find particular topics easily.
In addition to the body of text there are three types of references, cross-references and activities that appear as follows:
Highway Code references
Where topics are covered in The Highway Code these references give the appropriate rule or page numbers. The Driver's Handbook deliberately does not duplicate material covered in The Highway Code, but is intended to be used in conjunction with it. So please follow up these references.
See (chapter number and name) for related material or further expansion of the subject.
Whenever you see a box like this it contains questions and suggestions designed to expand your awareness of what you do, think and feel when you're driving.
Sometimes the questions are intended to encourage you to reflect on how you behave or how you have behaved at certain times in the past. There's a great deal of learning to be gained from this reflective thinking.
Carrying out the activities or exercises produces a different kind of learning from simply reading about them. It's one thing to know about something; quite another to know it through direct experience.