Ho Ho Ho Oh No: Driver testing at Christmas
For many drivers and certainly many learner drivers, December means more opportunities to get out on the road.
School, University and work often start to wind down for the year and for Learner Driver’s a shift moves to obtain their provisional licence. Many Learner drivers cannot help if their birthday falls at the end of the year or they finally have the skills to sit their driving assessments to move into the next stage of the Graduate Licencing Scheme. Some drivers in want of licences see the end of the year as a good as time as any to sit a test. Unfortunately, a carefree attitude regarding their driving ability mixed with a number of seasonal obstacles can very well become costly and may spell another test booking in January.
Here are some factors that can affect test successes over the Christmas season:
Higher Volume of Traffic
As more people choose to have time away from work and studies the roads then become busier throughout the day, normal levels of day to day traffic increase as more people are able to move freely about their business. People trade in their normal commute to work or studies through public transport, bicycles, motorbikes or on foot with their personal vehicles, leading to more cars on the road in normally low levels of traffic in the middle of the day.
Driver Inexperience and Complacency
Many full licence drivers spend their normal day driving to the same location, taking the same routes and dealing with similar conditions of traffic. They join the rat race in the morning to get to work or studies and do the same in the afternoon for the commute home. This monotonous style of driving creates patterns of behaviour and allows drivers to fall into a sense of false confidence about their ability or in some cases mask inabilities, being able to hide mistakes through following others. When these same drivers are given the ability to use the road during their end of year free time, they are often going to unfamiliar places or driving during times that challenge them. These challenges could lead to poor decision making or errors in judgement. Unpredictability in other drivers on the road can spell disaster for an emerging driver who has only learnt the basics and hasn’t experience a wealth of different scenarios on the road.
Drugs and Alcohol
In Australia, December routinely sees a spike in the amount of alcohol and recreational drugs people will consume. Christmas Day, New Years Eve and even leading towards Australia Day the social stigma to let your hair down with alcohol and increasingly recreational drugs makes for some challenging times on the road. Negotiating other drivers on the road that cannot react to your inexperience or complement your emerging abilities by showing care and guidance could put a new driver in uncomfortable and risky predicaments.
Driver Attitudes
For many, Christmas is a joyful time. Summer sun, family and friends, its a great time of year. However, this isn’t the experience for everyone. Christmas for lots of Australians is a sad and angry time of year. Anxiety, Depression, family and financial constraints and obligations are just a couple of reasons that can lead drivers to act differently on the road over Christmas. A person’s attitude in their daily life will always make it’s way into the car. Having to do a driving test with people around you who’s emotional condition is different to what you expect may make for a difficult driving test environment that hampers how you can perform on the day.
In short, navigating this snapshot of December driving isn’t impossible but it is important to go into a driving test in the silly season with confidence. Doing a driving test just because it’s convenient is short sighted. Doing a driving test because you are ready for the challenges that lie ahead will allow you to have a safe and merry Christmas.