Bad Driving Habits

This weekend, we went out on a little road trip with my mother.

It wasn't supposed to be a road trip; we were going to Christchurch, to a specific shop, to look at motorbike helmets. But my mother has an incredible ability to get lost in a paper bag. And so we did get rather monumentally lost, doing that classic trip of going up and down the same street several times, driving through a town four times, each from a different direction, and of course the old round-and-round-the-roundabout-we-go. 

Normally I don't mind things like this, but we had S in the car with us, so I was unusually paranoid and nervous about mother's ridiculous antics resulting in an accident.

Luckily S slept through most of Nana's crazy driving moves!

When I came home, I found I had an email about the UK's most hated driving habits. You might have heard about this in the news recently; I know my local radio did a piece on it the other day. The second most irksome driving habit is incorrect or no signalling... say for example, if you just kept going around a roundabout, without either turning off or indicating that you're not turning off...

There were some other interesting points in the survey: for one thing, it seems we're all a bit judgemental when it comes to a car's appearance. Apparently 26% of us think that tinted windows = irresponsible driver, and 30% think having a Taz bumper sticker means a bad driver is on board. Remember that, next time you're shopping for bumper stickers!

Being a passenger, and the mother of the toddler in the car, I ended up spending much of our trip saying "er, do you know the speed limit on this road?" and "could you perhaps be a little more gentle on the brake please!" every few minutes - both of which contributed to my mother's general stressiness. Not only is she great at getting lost, she's not yet mastered the art of the shrug. She forgets that there are sign posts at every junction and it's virtually impossible to be lost when there are three mobile phones in the car, all of which have GPS, Google Maps and who knows what else on them.

Incidentally, the survey didn't look at which sort of bumper sticker denotes a big bubble of stress with no sense of direction... I don't think it's the "Powered by Fairy Dust" one though!

Disclaimer: this post was written in collaboration with Truck Locator Online.