CONSCIOUS CONSTANT PRACTICE = SKILL

DRIVE SMART – DRIVE SAFE DRIVE WITH PACKS
PACKS = Patience, Awareness, Courtesy, Knowledge, Skill

Have you thought of what being a skilled driver means? Do you consciously want to become a skilled driver?
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being unskilled and 10 being a highly trained skilled driving specialist, where do you place yourself? Are you a 10? Or would you call yourself average in driving skills, like a 5, or above average, like an 8? Can you be a skilled driver at the age of 17, or at the age of 80? Are patience and courtesy necessary attributes for you to be a skilled driver? How much knowledge do you need to be a skilled driver? How much practice do you need to be a skilled driver? And finally, is a skilled driver necessarily a safe driver?
Are you surprised that some people are more skillful than others in every field of activity? You name it, and any activity you pick has famous performers in their fields. And they all consciously and constantly practice to improve their skills. However, believe it or not, most people with drivers licenses consider themselves highly skilled drivers even without consciously and constantly practicing.
Skill generally comes from practice and from the knowledge that experience can provide. Apprenticeships for trades, internships for doctors and surgeons, simulator-trainers for pilots, all train people to gain skills through hands-on, relatively danger-free, practice environments. “Practice makes perfect.” Dangerous situations and events that occur while driving provide the skills that most drivers acquire. It’s a hell of a way to learn, especially because most drivers do not consciously and constantly pay attention to driving. How often are you eating in your car or how often is your radio on, or you’re talking on the cell phone or to the passenger in your vehicle? How often are you thinking about something other than driving while you are driving?
What must you learn or be to become a skilled driver? What personal qualities must you possess to be a skilled driver? You must learn to concentrate on driving consciously and constantly! And you must drive with PACKS!
Getting a drivers license at sixteen implies maturity or ripening to the point of being able to operate a vehicle. The license does not assure that skill, knowledge, and awareness, are immediately present in the young new driver. Sadly, and all too often, young new drivers believe they possess those qualities – after all, they did pass the drivers test! Crash, injury, and death statistics prove otherwise. Our driver education systems in the United States force new drivers to learn by actual driving experience – a poor method for teaching an inherently dangerous set of skills. What do you think about that? If the incidence of collisions by newly licensed drivers is any measure of danger, then the roads are a highly dangerous environment for new drivers to learn driving skills.
Our Drivers Ed systems generally teach vehicle operation and our States systems test for the ability to operate a vehicle. That is not “skill.” In some states, even that minimal education is poorly funded and poorly administered and often the testing of that minimal ability is perfunctory and superficial. Rarely does an instructor have the time or even the training to educate young drivers in safe driving fundamentals. Testers wince more than they applaud when they are out on the road with young license aspirants. If a system was intentionally devised to guarantee some minimum number of vehicle crashes per year, our United States patchwork-quilt system of driver education and testing could well serve as a model to assure the continued mayhem on our highways!

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, and not much else!

Uncle PACKSman

Quick Tip: Look to the right road shoulder when oncoming high beams begin to blind you at night.