Pro-active

In driving terms this means the ability to predict the actions of others rather than waiting to see what they do and then react to it.

Driver efficiency, now there's an emotive term. To most drivers that would mean how quickly a journey could be accomplished or how many calls could be achieved in a day. This is not the principal concern  of a security operative or Pl. Whatever the problems in your own particular field, improving driver effi­ciency basically hinges about one point - increased pro-activity. A pro-active driver is one who is aware of increased danger and ensures that when the accident occurs, he is somewhere else. He is able to perceive increased risk in situations before he enters them.

How he can achieve this is sometimes quite difficult to explain during road training, unless the driver himself has the desire not to get involved in the accident. This simply means that he understands what the risk is, where the risk is and how it would affect him if he were to get involved. If that sounds crazy, then perhaps we should take a step back and look at this problem objectively.

A  modern car driver has an extremely high level of comfort and a plethora of equipment to make his day more pleasurable. His vehicle is capable of much more than motorway speeds, in relative quiet and comfort, handles better than would ever be necessary in normal driving and can out-brake most vehicles on the road. He uses this vehicle for business, for pleasure, often for long holiday journeys as well as  trips to the newsagent on a Sunday morning. Many vehicles are also equipped as an extension of your lounge, or office, with leather "armchairs", CD players, phones and even faxes and in-car computers.

So why is that a problem? Well let's look at it from the drivers view first. He feels safe, is detached from the actual sensations of driving by his power-steering and modern suspension, feels capable of doing more than he should attempt in terms of speed and handling and so begins to drive in a style that ac­commodates that feeling. He also feels that driv ing is not occupying as much of his concentration or ef­ fort  as it  once did and so he is tempted to do other things while driving. Most often he is using the phone, but there are cases of drivers reading notes and dictating letters while driving at speed on motor­ ways.

Kinaesthesia

A behavioral term for the sensory feedback felt by the body from external sources. In the case of driving a car, it means the feedback you receive from a steering wheel and by the way the car  handles

The truth is that most drivers suffer from Kinaesthesia - and I use the term "suffer" wisely, because it is the loss of feedback from the car that has caused some of the worst accidents in recent times. Why would anyone willingly drive into fog at 80mph, unless they "felt" safe and had the confidence of their   cars ability to handle whatever happened next. They obviously confuse the cars ability with their own  and it is the driver who becomes the weak link in the chain that causes the accident.. Before we can consider driving under stress on a security or surveillance mission, we need to address this problem  first. Most importantly, we must never allow ourselves to think that we can do things that we consider dangerous when carried out by others.

So why is it that are so poor at predicting the actions of other drivers? It all stems from our initial train ­ ing, where we were deliberately taught to drive to a system and not to think for ourselves. Once the sys­tem was taught, we began to expect that everyone else drove by the same system - despite the fact that even we did not maintain this degree of precision or rigidity in our driving once we had passed the test. This has caused us to expect other drivers to always signal, to always warn us of their actions - whereas the more a driver uses a particular route, the less he will bother to signal or consider other road users.

For  a good example of this, consider the driver who joins your road from a side road on the left. What   do you anticipate he will do next? If you said turn right, congratulations. You have already discovered  one of the best kept secrets in driving. Drivers who join your road are not making the same journey as you, will not remain on your road, and will more often leave the road in the opposite direction to the way that they joined than any other option.

This is not some mysterious force in action, simply logic - more precisely "Fuzzy Logic". Under the rules of Fuzzy Logic, for every vehicle that joins your road and travels to your own destination , there are as many other possibilities as there are roads, entrances and other features on that road. However , as drivers inevitably drive from A to B for a reason, the reason is either on your road, or more likely on the opposite side of the road to the side that they joined - hence the most likely outcome as described  above.

On a practical level, this allows you to anticipate their next move and not over-react when they suddenly brake or move out to turn. From a security level, it means that you can back off early and maintain your options, from a surveillance driver's point of view, it allows you to anticipate the need to give the vehicle time to turn and to expect to be held-up. This in turn allows you to look ahead early and watch your tar­ get until the vehicle in front of you carries out his next move. The less surprises that we are faced with daily, the safer and easier our task becomes.

Another example is that of following a driver into a 30 limit and seeing that his speed actually drops to around 30mph. What does that mean? Well most often it shows that he lives there, that while he paid no attention to other limits, he is conscious of the limit in his own village and would not be able to live with himself if he ran into a neighbour. Expect him to stop at the local shop, or turn off with little warning. In fact, look out for him stopping to chat with a friend or neighbour. This should become more obvious as you monitor other drivers and is just as likely to occur in urban areas, where drivers suddenly change their habits for no apparent reason - and then stop or turn without  warning.

Whatever you think about other drivers, no doubt at some time in your driving career, other drivers would feel the same about you. We are all guilty of habitual driving and of having predictable habits that we can learn to understand an if necessary alter in order.to prevent them becoming a contributory factor to our next accident.

Earlier in the manual we discussed "Grey" vehicles - well there is one truly grey vehicle which is almost totally invisible in the UK, the ubiquitous BT van. BT has the largest fleet in the country, the vast major­ity of which are Grey vans - but what do you know about  them?

• If you notice a BT van emerging from a side road, what do you next expect to see  happen?
• If you pass a BT van on a narrow country road, with the driver busy up a telegraph pole, what can you anticipate?
• You are following a BT van  and considering an overtake, what  extra precautions should you take?

The answers are all connected, in that the most common factor associated with the use of BT vans is  that they operate in pairs, or even in teams. Logically you would expect one emerging BT van to be fol­lowed by a second. Passing one van working on a pole often means another nearby, possibly  in the   most inconvenient part of the road and often just beyond a blind bend. Finally, if the BT van you wish to overtake is apparently alone, and the second van is not in your own mirror, then he may be in a hurry to overtake himself, or may turn off suddenly into a driveway or turning other than a "normal"  road.

So where does this leave us? Do we need to adopt an intense paranoia about the actions of other drivers? Luckily the answer is no! The easiest way to use this information is as a reminder of why you need to control or maintain space. Space is the real goal in any advanced or defensive driving  tech­nique, without space you have few options. Even with space you are limited in certain areas and have to be prepared to use the space that you are protecting to give you the options that you are seeking. As  long as you can slow, stop or avoid hazards in your own time and under control, you will seldom become involved in the problems of other  drivers.

Space should be thought of as an escape route, a means of avoiding contact with other vehicles. But why is it that you can manage to stop and avoid hitting others with care, but then someone unexpected ly hits you and spoils all of your efforts? Believe it or not, much of the blame could rest with you not having given the other driver sufficient information to enable him to be aware of the hazard. You may have maintained your safe stopping distance from the vehicle ahead of you but not allowed more because of the  proximity of the following vehicle.

So now we are moving from theory into practice. Now that you have understood that you can predict the actions of others, how do we notify the less wary? How do we "control" other traffic without them becom­ing annoyed at us and exercising Road Rage? The trick is to give them the signals that they will respond to, or to give them the impression that one possible action is about to occur, when in fact you are about  to do something slightly different and perhaps more unexpected. Most importantly , you must constantly tell yourself that no matter what you have learned and what you know about the potential for danger, you will be the only person expecting it and as such must carefully take control of protecting  your own  space.