Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherCat
 It is good to see that there is at least one other person around here who has overtly shown that they understand what Situational Awareness and Spatial Awareness are and so are capable of making considered safe decisions appropriate to the circumstances.
Those incapable of making such decisions are a danger because while they may have inflexible rules for themselves to get over the incapability, sooner or later they will find they do not have a rule to cover a situation they find themselves in and end up involved in an otherwise avoidable fault or no fault accident. |
If that little dig was aimed at me, you have wrongly understood the point I've been making. It's not a matter of "inflexible rules", but of being in a position at all times to properly control the vehicle in the anticipation of an unexpected event occurring which will require that control. If you're driving down a motorway holding a coffee cup in one hand, on 999 journeys out of 1000 you'll be absolutely fine, but on that 1000th journey you'll find yourself in a position where you're unable to react swiftly and appropriately to the situation, because you do not have both hands free to correctly control the vehicle.
"Expect the unexpected" should always be the attitude when performing any potentially hazardous activity, such as a driving a motor vehicle.
Should you be tempted to say "things like that don't happen", it's happened to me personally. Some years ago I was driving along the M6 motorway near Manchester. Good road conditions, sunny day, no reason in the world to anticipate any problems. A car in the outside line of the opposite carriageway suddenly veered wildly, hit the central reservation, catapulted over it, and ended up upside down across the two outer lines of my side of the road. I had to swerve violently into the inside lane (I had been in the middle lane) to avoid it. Had I had my hands full of coffee cups there's no way in the world that I could have avoided hitting it. Things like that really make you realise just how aware you need to be as to the potential to have to take sudden emergency action, regardless of how calm and safe the road appears to be at the time.