Eyes peeled

This month Roger looks at other drivers’ habits and ponders whether autonomous vehicle lighting helps or hinders road users?

It is interesting to see how the effects of being highly skilled at doing a specific job affects how you approach life outside of doing that job. In my own case many years as a uniformed policeman and highly qualified vehicle examiner still sees me looking at people and vehicles around me with a degree of ‘auto analysis’ even now, some 19 years after retiring from that role.

I used to look deeper at other drivers and vehicle occupants with a specific view to look for people committing offences, be it something simple, such as driving an untaxed car, to myriad more serious offences for which they often gave away signals in the way they reacted to the usual liveried police car I would be driving. I don’t look in that way anymore but I still look at drivers, to assess whether they are concentrating on driving, and give a wider berth if they are clearly occupied by something else, commonly a phone.

A still very useful professional hangover is noting other vehicles’ registrations and, if it has a foreign registration, expect it to be lefthand-drive and this means their view to the right side and rear isn’t as good as it will be with a righthand-drive vehicle. This is of huge potential safety value if that vehicle is a large, articulated goods vehicle as, irrespective of how many mirrors they have on the right side of the cab, the driver’s view to the right side of the vehicle is never as good as it is for a right-hand-drive lorry.