Drivers Ed.

When I was in high school, we took driver's education in school. We meet as part of the regular daily school schedule and our head football coach taught the class. I have a January birthday, so I was one of the lucky ones who got to take driver's ed my freshman year. You had to turn 15 by Feb 1 because part of the class was actually driving a car, so you had to have your learner's permit. The car actually had a second steering wheel and brake on the passenger side, so the teacher could control the car. I had the distinction of being the only person that coach ever actually used the brake on. It was not my fault, there was another car but I had the right of way. I guess I did not apply the brake quick enough in anticipation that the other car might run the stop sign, so coach did. Turns out the other car stopped in plenty of time and the extra breaking was unnecessary.

We also got to use a simulator, which was pretty cool, but this being Mississippi, I had already been driving various vehicles since I was 12, including my uncles pickup truck, a tractor, a front end loader, road grader and forklift. In fact I totaled my mom's car when I was 13. She had a small white Fiat 4 speed. It was a pretty cool car and in the 1970's not very many folks in the US even knew what a Fiat was which made it even cooler. Of course after I crashed it, my folks sold it off for scrap. I never knew for sure but I think it came back to life as a dune buggy. Which of course would have made it an even cooler car.

I figure taking driver's ed for an entire semester, we had a total of 90 hours of classroom, simulation and actual driving time. In 2009, Texas requires you to take 47 hours of instruction including classroom and actual driving time. After driving on the Texas freeways, I am pretty sure one way they squeezed down 90 hours to 47 is they no longer explain to drivers how a limited access road is supposed to work. I know we had to learn the proper way to drive on a freeway, even though the closest freeway was over an hour drive away from my hometown. The whole freeway system is based on the assumption that traffic stays to the right only using the left lane when you need to pass a car in front of you. After passing the car you get back into the right lane. It seems that on most of the freeways I drive on today, cars just get into whatever lane they want, regardless of how fast they are driving. Usually it seems they are driving the exact same speed as the cars in the lanes beside them. The effect is that traffic wishing to drive faster backs up behind a bottleneck of slower moving cars.

I will give you that maybe it is just my perspective that traffic moves worse when people don't follow the slower traffic keep right rule, because I don't like being stuck behind slower moving cars. The comedic genius George Carlin once observed that every car moving slower than you is an "idiot" and every car moving faster than you is a "maniac".

The first time I actually drove on a freeway was when we were on family vacation, driving through Atlanta Georgia, during rush hour in a blinding rainstorm. My father was a big believer in the whole sink or swim concept. Fortunately I did not crash our car and we made it through Atlanta unscathed. Of course I am sure I drove in the right lane most of the time, because that was what I was supposed to do since I was going so slow.