Gimps, Gears and Geeks.

Gimp can make animated gifs. I never knew this before.

Here's one I made earlier.

The reson I made this particular animated gif is because I had this idea that if I was so excited by the prospect of chucking a really quick car around a track, then presumably the sort of person that goes looking for driving lessons might be too. So I intend to do a prize draw in 2012, with the supercar driving experience as the prize.

On a similar vein, I've just sent an enquiry to a local (ish) company that does skid control lessons with a view to offerering one of their things as a prize, or even some kind of collaborative venture where they offer some kind of discount, and I incorporate them into my curriculum.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Doing the business...

The daily deal format is pretty new. Here's how it works.

A merchant contacts the daily deal website, and offers a substantial discount to their subscribers.
Interested subscribers buy vouchers representing the deal. They give their money to the daily deal website.
The website then gives some of that money to the merchant.
So the subscriber gets a product or service at a knock down price. The website take a big chunk of the money given by the subscriber. The merchant gets business.

Today, my driving school has been the focus of Wirral deals on the Living Social website.

Instead of the usual £20 per hour, Living Social subscribers are being offered 3 hours for £19. Of that, Living Social take about £9+VAT, so I actually get about £8.50 per voucher. Less than £3 per hour, but of course, some of those subscribers will go on to take proper full price lessons.

So how well is it being taken up?

It's exceeded my expectations by quite a long way. Getting the deal up in the first week of December was a huge bonus of course. These vouchers are the perfect christmas gift to give a teenager, and about twenty quid is a pretty typical amount for people to want to spend on nephews or grandkids or whatever.

So far, 20 people have bought vouchers. If all of them went on to take a full course with me, and they were all absolute beginners, and they rook the average 43 hours to get through their tests, that would be 20 people x 40 hours (43 minus the 3 cheap ones) x 20 quid. That's £16,000!

That's not going to happen of course. And that £16,000 is income, not profit, but still, this looks like it's going to have been  a really good way of getting business. Certainly better than giving some arrogant parasite £130 a week. So far, Living Social will have made somewhere around £200 from me, but it looks like I'm going to hit the ground running in the new year.

Some of those subscribers (21 of them now) will already have had lessons. Some will be just going from cheap deal to cheap deal, regardless of how well they've been taught. Some may not redeem their vouchers, or may not like me or my methods. We can't all be born with taste after all!

I will probably do this again sometime next year.

Optimistic for a change!

The deal page has also been driving traffic (excuse the pun) to my website.

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Update: With around five and a half hours to go, I'm now up to 30 vouchers. 90 hours work, for £262, and the potential to bring in as much as £24,000. I have access to a list of purchasers and a bit of demographic info. 78% of purchasers have been female. Over three quarters of payments were made via computer. 10% was by Iphone. Quite a lot of them have been bought as gifts. One person has bought three vouchers, each gifted to a different person. Merry Christmas to them!

Might even be able to get the roof mended some time in the spring.

Further update: 7 dec 2011...

Living social are extending my promotion by another 72 hours - a second chance thing. not as the headline promotion, but further down the page.

So, it won't be generating customers at the same high frequency. Apart from it being less high profile, those interested in driving lessons will presumably have already seem this offer and acted on it. Still, 3 more days of it, and all the stuff about ideal gifts still being true, I could potentially double the 32 vouchers sold.

I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew.

car stuff...

Diesels emit less CO2 than petrols, but there is still only a certain amount of either type of fuel that can be extracted from a barrel of crude. So if everyone suddenly changed to diesel, they'd need to supply more crude than they do for the current petrol/diesel mix)

Still, as someone that covers a lot more than the average number of miles each year, it makes sense to use a diesel rather than a petrol. The diesel engine takes me between 40 and 50 miles on a gallon of fuel, depending on the type of driving I or my pupil are doing. When I taught in a petrol engined Ford Focus, I was getting between 22 and 30 miles to the gallon.

If you pass your test in a car with automatic transmission in the UK, you can only drive cars with automatic transmission. If you pass in a manual car, you can drive either sort. So automatic tuition is something of a niche market. I've driven automatics before, but not much, and I much prefer the control and familiarity of a manual car.

Finally, hybrid or electric engined cars are obviously going to be much more to the fore in the fairly near future.

So I've been looking for a hybrid diesel with manual transmission, and until now there has been no such thing. Hybrid cars, like thr Prius, are almost always automatics. Honda's CRZ is a manual hybrid, but that was about the only one available, and it's an odd looking beast.

It's also petrol engined. So only two of my three requirements are met. From what I've read, it's not as fuel efficient as my current diesel Ford fiesta.

It's easy of course to find a diesel with manual transmission. Two out of three boxes ticked again. But what of that holy grail vehicle? The Diesel Hybrid with manual transmission?

Well diesel hybrids are starting to happen. Volvo do one. Mercedes Benz do one. And Peugeot do one.

the volvo promises just 49g/km of CO2 - Less than half of what my little fiesta emits, and that's in a car that produces enough power to drag it's heavy carcass from 0-60 in under 7 seconds. And it's claimed to do an average of 150 miles per gallon. A huge leap forwards compared to what most cars offer. Unfortunately, it's far too big to teach in. And it has an automatic gearbox. And it's going to cost about £40,000. That's far more than I can afford to pay.

The Merc does about 70 miles to the gallon and produces about 109g/km of co2. No improvement on what I have already then really, since that 70mpg, like all manufacturers figures, is almost certainly utter bollocks. It's also automatic only, and although the cost has not been announced yet, it's a luxury vehicle and is in no way suitable for people who like to smack into kerbs and stall at the drop of a hat.

Finally, there's the Peugeot 3008.

Now this is a diesel. It's also a hybrid. And it has a manual gearbox!

It chugs out 99g/km of co2 - not much less than my fiesta, which produces about 110. What you get is not more efficiency but more power - around 200bhp when you use both electric motor and diesel engine. So still not quite what I'm after. Also it's selling for about 27,000 quid. Still far above my budget. One for the early adopters.

Things are heading in the right direction though, albeit far too slowly. In terms of the bigger picture of course, this does seem like shutting the stable door after you've rearranged the deckchairs. But perhaps two years from now, I will be teaching my pupils in a manual diesel hybrid.

An unexpected pleasure.

The day before yesterday, I got an email out of the blue. It came from a German woman who is working in Wallasey. She's going back to Germany shortly, but before she goes, she wanted to drive on English roads, so that if in the future she had to do so, she would have the knowledge and the confidence to do so.

So that's what I did for two hours yesterday morning. Something different to the run-of-the-mill stuff. Her English was good enough to get by mainly, and I was careful in both choice and delivery of my words.

She called roundabouts "circles" and roadsigns, "Shields". Whether these are the german words, or the english translations I'm not sure.

What she found hardest to get to grips with (literally) was using her left hand to change gear. The pedals are in the same order regardless of which side of the road you drive on, but when you drive on the right, the gearstick is on your right. She quickly got the hang of this, and what initially promised to be a difficult session turned into a free-flowing drive that covered everything from tight residential streets, via twisty country lanes, to motorway driving. She finished the lesson with a big smile on her face.

One challenge for me was to concentrate on stuff that mattered (making sure she could work out where to put herself, making sure she knew where to look, giving her time space and practice in the physical act of driving from an unfamiliar position) and ignoring things that didn't really matter too much, such as whether she used push pull steering, or was occasionally coasting.

driving lessons wallasey driving lessons wirral driving lessons birkenhead driving instructor driving school

Blogger Vs Wordpress

I keep trying with Wordpress. I really do. I can see that it has real potential. Yet doing simple things like removing or adding page elements, or getting it to put line breaks between paragraphs seem only possible through an esoteric and convoluted process. I'm sure there are ways of doing what I want to do, but it's a whole lot of work.

Also, worpress wants to charge me for using my own domain name. It seems that blogger allows me to do this for free. I'm not making any firm commitment to any platform yet, but I've made a lot more progress using the blogger site than I have with the wordpress one.

In case anyone's interested, here are the two sites.

Blogger


Wordpress

Blogger loads up faster than wordpress, at least on my computer at this moment.

Still trying stuff. What you see there at the moment is probably not what it will end up looking like.

And I will continue to try with wordpress. Even if I can't do things conventionally, I might find workarounds using more creative methods.

master of my own domain.

I'm now the proud owner of two shiny new domain names.

paulsharpdriving.com and paulsharpdriving.co.uk

I've also started a blog using wordpress, and a blog using blogger.

They're not intended to be blogs. Just free webspace. Somewhere to point the advertising to. The intention is that I use the stuff I've picked up over the last few years, as this blog has developed to make a website that's easy to navigate, and pleasing to the eye. They will link to and from the how to fail blog I've been doing, and to each other. I could make one the .com one and the other the .co.uk one. Maybe.

I get the sense that wordpress is more powerful and versatile than blogger, but I find blogger much easier to use.

Anyway, if I cross link them all, It will help in the search placings, or so I understand. Also, using metatags -invisible words embedded in the code that show up when google sends it's spiders out looking - is supposed to help with this. It used to anyway.

I can insert html either into blog posts, or into the structure of the entire blog, and I can use my web design software to generate that code, using the wysiwyg side of things to make up for my shortcomings on the coding side of things.




This bit was done using dreamweaver.

I don't know how to go past a certain point. Beyond these simple design things, coding baffles me.

I get by well enough though.

Up and away... soon... maybe....

Shhh! Do you hear that?

It's the sound of loins being girded. Of palms being spat upon. Of sleeves being rolled up.

You see, I'm going to go on my own again, only, not just yet. I'm preparing the ground first. Getting things in place, so that when I tell my current booking agent I am not going to pay him any more, I have some other means of getting work.

So, I have been informing my current crop of pupils that if I do leave, their arrangement is with me, not with the driving school as a whole, and that they don't have to go with a different instructor, no matter what they are told.

I've got a load of free business cards printed, and I use them as appointment cards for my pupils, letting them know that should that card come back to me from someone else, they get a free lesson, or £20 if they've passed their test.

I've found our old dreamweaver disk, and installed all sorts of macromedia gubbins on my computer with a view to creating a simple website.

Currently I'm giving £130 a week to my booking agent. I'm gambling that if I give my money to google/facebook/the local ad rag/etc, I will be able to fill my diary better than I'm doing right now. I'm gambling that since it's me that get's the credit for a good job done, and not someone elses school, eventually I will have to pay out far less to find work.

But for now, I'm going to carry on as I was.

I feel much better, although I'm finding the website creation thing a bit daunting. Not so much the stylistic elements. Generally that's straightforward, if occasionally a chore. But the actual nuts and bolts stuff about root folders and ftp transfer.

Might just spend a few quid on one of those website in a box packages where you get a "free" domain name and what have you.

Rent-A-Wreck

Just thinking out loud.

We're on the bones of our arses here. All relative of course, when you consider the poor starving wretches of Somalia or Bangladesh, but without doing anything profligate like going on holiday or repairing the roof of our house, we're gradually slipping further and further into debt.

Much of this is down to me. Partly because sloth is the deadly sin I'd associate myself with more than all the others combined. Partly because I don't like confrontation. So when pupils leave, I don't always tell my boss, because he gives me a hard time about it. So I don't have enough work.

And when you need £300 a week just to break even, this can very quickly go tits up.

So here's my thought.

Rent a wreck school of motoring.

CHEAP DRIVING LESSONS! NERVOUS WRECKS WELCOME!

Let's face it, most learners will not be driving around in brand new cars when they've passed their tests. They will be buying cheapo old bangers.

So why not teach in one? Make it a selling point? Certainly the question everone asks when they ring up about lessons is "How much do you charge?"

Currently my weekly costs break down as follows:

franchise - £130
car - £85
insurance - £20
fuel - £80

total - £315

These are rough figures. They jumped upward because of the VAT increase. They are climbing steadily because of fuel costs.

But what if I got some cheap pile of cack fromthe bargain basement of my local garage? Annual budget of perhaps £500 a year.

Well that's £10 a week. Add a couple of hundred quid for the cost of fitting dual controls. So that then goes to maybe £15 or £20 a week.

Because the car would be worth less, it would be cheaper to insure. Perhaps £500 a year instead of £900. That's £10 a week.

Fuel costs would probably go up a bit, especially if I got a petrol car rather than a diesel. Let's call it £100 a week.

Finally, if I do this, then I won't have to give all that money to The Man. But I will have to spend something on advertising. Last time round I seriously underestimated the amount I would have ot spend. So let's commit £50 a week to google, newspaper ads, yellow pages, website, whatever.

So what does that add up to?

£180 a week. Rather better than £315.

But that's only part of the story. We also have to live. Pay bills. Keep wolf from door. That kind of stuff. Roughly, we need about £200 a week to do this.

I need to earn £515 a week to get by. How the fuck did that happen? I used to get by on the dole, sort of.

Anyway, where was I ?

Oh yeah. £515.

I get £20 a lesson. That's effectively £20 an hour because I need to get from one lesson to another and I don't have a teleport. So I need to do 26 hours a week.

Of course the big selling point of shithole school of motoring would be that it's cheap.

I'd keep it simple. No frills. No gimmicks. No introductory offers. Just a straightforward flat rate.

Say, £15/hour.

Still got to find that £200 a week to pay the bills. New overheads would be £180 a week.

That's £380 a week. I'd need to do 26 hours a week doing it this way too.

OK well how about £16 an hour? Still well below the current market rate. Well that puts it down a bit. Now got to do 24 hours a week.

So not that much to choose in terms of how hard I'd have to work.

But there's more to it.

You see, I'm not really interested in becoming rich. I can't be arsed. I became an instructor because I wanted to earn enough per hour that I wouldn't have to slog my bollocks off for 40+ hours a week to earn a crust.

Currently, if I have a few bad weeks, I quickly find I'm up shit creek. Of course, if I have a good few weeks, I make a lot of money. But this never happens. Not the way I'm doing things right now.

As an example, let's say I do 15 hours.

Right now that brings in £300, and I fail to cover my overheads (actually I'd probably break even becuase my fuel costs would be down a bit) but I would still have to find £200 to pay the bills.

With rent a wreck, I do the same 15 hours and it brings in £240. But my overheads would be perhaps £130, again shit week = less fuel. Still not earning enough, but only about £90 short instead of £200.

I cannot carry on the way I have been. It's unsustainable. We face losing our home unless something changes. So either I find a way of making a go of this, or I do something else instead.

Check Test...

First thing in the morning, I have a check test.

Every few years, us instructors have to give a driving lesson with an examiner sat in the back, to make sure we're still up to the job.

Instructors are graded from 1 to 6. Grade 6 is the highest. Grades 1,2 or 3 are not good enough, and if you fail to make at least grade 4 three times, they take your name off the register.

My first one was about 4 years ago, just a few months after I'd become fully qualified. I got a grade 5. Lots of 6's on the checklist, but just short of an overall 6 grade.

I know I'll do OK tomorrow. A grade 6 would be nice. A 5 is fine. I'll be disappointed with a 4, and unless something very strange happens, I'm not going to get less than that.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Update:

I got a disappointing grade 4. It's a pass, and I can carry on doing my job for the next few years, but I didn't really do myself justice today. Not good at tests, me. I crap myself every time.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Further update:

My first check test occurred a few scant months after becoming fully qualified.

Being unsure of myself, I sought advice from the person that trained me to be an instructor. I was nervouse going into it, and put a lot of work into what I wanted to do. Then, at the last moment, all my carefully prepared lesson plans were scuppered because I got a phone call informing me that I would have to do the check test from a different test centre.

So I had to extemporise, and things were very natural, because that's generally what I do in a typical lesson anyway.

This time around things were different. I was pretty certain that I wasn't going to fail, and a top grade is mainly a selling point - since I'm paying some guy to give me the work, the grade is as much a matter of pride as anything.

So I was surprised to find that last night, my head was full of it all. When I finally got to sleep, I dreamed I had to do the test by teaching someone I know who I find difficult to deal with. (There was a pun of sorts in there too. This particular pain in the bum person was busy doing anything but what I needed her to be doing with a former pupil that shares the same first name as the girl I actually did the lesson with.)

And today, I was indeed nervous.

Sometimes I get a pupil that can deal with (for example) roundabouts, but one particular roundabout causes them no end of grief. The roundabout is just a series of hazards to be negotiated, just like any other bit of road, but my pupil, for whatever reason, associates that particular situation with fear.

So when confronted with it, they are less comfortable with it than they would be with an identical situation without the same associations.

There's a sort of interactive triangle going on. The labels in the boxes on each corner reading, PHYSICAL, INTELLECTUAL, and EMOTIONAL. Weaken one, and the entire triangle totters. Strengthen one and the entire triangle becomes sturdier.

In my case, the guy sitting in the back was the same person that I had to face for my final qualifying exam. I was far more conscious of his presence than I was a different examiner on my first check test. It's not his fault in any way, and the points he made during the debrief at the end of the test were absolutely correct.

I sometimes get it wrong too.

I try stuff. And not everything I try works.

Usually, this doesn't matter too much. I try something else instead.

Yesterday evening though, things came together to make for one of the worse lessons I've even given.

It had actually been quite a good day. I had an early test, so I was up at half past six. My pupil passed. Another happy customer.

I should then have taught someone who I shall call Jan.

Jan has had some lovely lessons with me, but she's also struggled with nerves at times. She should have had her driving test today, but I felt she would be better off postponing it by a couple of weeks.

Jan had texted me earlier to put her lesson back to the evening instead, so I had a free couple of hours, then another driving test.

My pupil for this test also passed. 2 passes in one day is good going by any instructors standards.

Anyway, then I had the rearranged lesson with Jan, starting at about 5pm.

I had a vague idea that I wanted to get her driving outside her normal area, to see how well she would adapt. Unfortunately, getting her to drive outside her normal area, at rush hour, in the dark, was far more than she could deal with, and all I managed to do was to destroy her confidence.

Normally, at this point, I'd change things. Get her back in more familiar surroundings for a start. But I made more wrong decisions, and we ended up driving back along some pitch black country lanes.

Why? Well mainly it was because I was tired. I'd been up since 6.30 the previous day too, and I just wasn't thinking as well or as clearly as I usually do. Partly because we'd ended up in an area where I wasn't as accustomed to teaching. I know all the roads where we ended up, but not as naturally or as fluently as the roads around Wallasey. And sometimes the delay in working out a better way meant that we'd gone past the places where we could have gone a better way.

We got back, and I explained to Jan that the reason she'd had a bad lesson was because of the decisions I'd made, but that's going to be small comfort to her right now.

A change of direction?

Like all jobs, being a driving instructor has both good aspects, and bits that I could quite happily live without.

The good bit is that I generally find it fulfilling. It fits my abilities as an intelligent communicator, and the evidence of my proficiency is clear to see every time somneone succeeds in being able to do something when they were struggling only minutes earlier. I love teaching. I'm actually teaching an experienced teacher at the moment, and it's been an interesting experience for both of us. He sees something of his own methods in many of the things I'm doing.

I also enjoy driving. In particular, I enjoy the skilled driving that I've been trained to do, and which I'm training others to do every day.

And having a nice shiny new car to do it in is also nice of course.

But to be a driving instructor, you need to be more than just a teacher. You also need to be a salesman. It's a competitive industry, and unless you pay close attention to the business side of things, it's difficult to make a living.

Salesman/businessman is not a role that sits comfortably with me, and so I've struggled.

I'm now giving a huge chunk of my earnings to someone who is emphatically a salesman, and in return, he gives me work.

So in order to be able to do this job I enjoy so much, I need to find somewhere around £300-350 a week just to cover my overheads. When the work doesn't come in, as happened last month, I very quickly get into serious financial shit.

There are other things to set against this job too. Being messed around by my clients for one. Having to do my own tax is another. The ethics of helping ever more people to get themselves fully qualified to drive, given my understanding of issues such as climate change and resource depletion is yet another thing to consider.

So, a few months ago, I enquired about becoming a driving examiner.

The examiners are not self employed teachers. They are civil servants, and they get paid not to teach, but to assess in a uniform way, the driving of the candidates they encounter. They work to a rigid set of criteria, unlike the dynamic, extemporising role I currently occupy.

I find this somewhat depressing, but on the other hand, I don't have to give £130 a week to some bloke who's already a millionaire, and I don't have to put up with some dickhead from Birkenhead who's convinced that 10 minutes is more than enough notice for cancelling a lesson, and who thinks the £20 a lesson is bloody extortionate.

The response to my enquiry was an e-mail informing me that the DSA had no current vacancies for examiners, but that they would keep my name on file for 12 months, and let me know if anything arose.

I assumed that would be the last I heard. At some later point, I would send another enquiry and they'd keep that on file for 12 months too. But a week or two ago, I got a letter informing me that vacancies would shortly be opening, and so I looked at the appropriate webpage and found that there were indeed vacancies for examiners.

Unfortunately, these were in places like Canaerfon, Blackpool, Hyde, etc. To take these would require either a relocation, or an extremely long and tedious daily commute.

The closest is probably Sale, which is on the outskirts of Manchester.

As you can see, this would entail a round trip of almost 100 miles, and a couple of hours travelling time each day. The journey to work would take place in rush hour, so I would have to leave home at 7am every day to make sure I got there on time.

I took an early morning drive out there to see how feasible it was. The M62 was at a standstill in some parts, and it took about 100 minutes to get to where I was going (although I got a bit lost at one point due to a road closure)

Still, it's do-able. Many people have far more tedious commutes, and the journey home, well before the evening rush hour would be far less onerous.

So I've applied. I don't know how far I will get, and if I'm not accepted, well I can still do what I'm doing. But it's just possible that a few months from now, I'm going to be a civil servant. With a clipboard and a shirt and tie.

Using Google Earth for something useful for a change.

Today I had an almost new pupil in West Kirby. Since we were having a double lesson, I decided to take him to the Croft industrial estate in Bromborough.

So onto the M53, and off at the Clatterbridge junction, then down through Spital to Bromborough.

Did lesson. Took him back.

Went back via Hooton.

But which is shorter? Which is quicker? Which uses the least fuel?

The difference in route starts at Clatterbridge and ends at the industrial estate.

Time to get my ruler out!

The light blue line shows the route when you come off the motorway at clatterbridge, and travel along urban roads to the Croft. The green line shows the route if you stay on the motorway to Hooton then travel along a 40 mile per hour dual carriageway to the same point.

I think it's fair to say that there's a clear winner in the "Shortest" category. 2.57 miles urban, against 7.15 miles on the quicker roads. I already knew the Hooton route would be longer, but I'm surprised to find that it's almost 3 times as long.

But which is quicker?

Well apart from 0.17 miles of motorway sliproad, the blue route is almost entirely 30 mile an hour urban stuff, punctuated by traffic lights, parked cars, zebra crossings, etc. A reasonable figure for the average speed on this route is perhaps 20 miles per hour. That's a mile every 3 minutes. So the blue route would take about 8 minutes.


The longer route consists of 0.75  miles at 30 miles an hour limit, 2.15 miles with a 40 mile an  hour limit, and about 4.25 miles of 70 mph motorway. The 30 mph bit is straight and wide, with just a single roundabout to slow things. So I'm going to assume an average speed of 25 miles per hour for this bit, meaning this would be covered in a little under 2 minutes. The 40 mph bit contains about 8 sets of traffic lights, so I'm going to say the 2.15 miles is done at an average speed of 35 miles an hour. And that works out at roughtly 4 minutes. Finally, 4.25 miles of motorway, done at slightly over a mile per minute (60 mph =1 mile per minute) would take about 4 minutes. Add these together and you get a nice round 10 minutes, so the long route takes a bit longer, even though the roads are faster. Not a huge difference in time though. If the speeds and times are average and approximate, there are times when it would actually be quicker to go this way.

Finally, although it's further to drive, and actually takes a little longer, is it possible that the green route uses less fuel?

Driving at a constant 30 miles an hour uses far less fuel than travelling at a constant 70. I did some experiments a couple of years back, travelling at different constant speeds along the same stretch of road, and recording the average fuel consumption. Unfortunately I can't find the figures now, but although the recieved wisdom is that the optimal speed for fuel economy is 56 miles per hour, this did not fit my experience at all. Travelling in a high gear, at a constant speed of 30 miles an hour used a lot less fuel than travelling in a high gear, at a constant speed of 50 miles per hour, which in turn used a lot less fuel than travelling in a high gear at a constant speed of 60 miles an hour.

The problem is that on urban roads, you're less able to drive at a constant speed. You're forever altering your speed. If you read the road well, you can keep stopping and starting to a minimum, but you can't eliminate the changes in speed completely. So the equation here is that the car is travelling at a speed that should be more economical, but this advantage is offset by less consistency in speed.

In order for the car to use less fuel on the longer run, it would have to use 3 times as much fuel travelling at speeds between 10 and 30 miles an hour as it does travelling at a fairly steady 70 miles an hour. At a constant speed of about 70, my car does about 38 miles per gallon. So I'd have to be doing about 13 miles to the gallon on urban roads for this to be the case.

And it isn't. I get somewhere around 40-45 mpg. Therefore the car uses far less fuel going the blue way.

So to summarise, in future, I will only ever travel between Clatrterbridge and the Croft industrial estate via Bromborough and Spital. It's superior in every way!

Mockery

ver the years, I've done a lot of mock tests.










Most of my pupils get one as they approach test standard. I use it to find out what I need to work on to make them truly independent, as well as giving them a feel for what it's like to be on test.

It's a different situation from your usual driving lesson, in that I give instructions, but the pupil is expected to carry out those instructions for themselves to the best of their ability. Because I use it as a fault finding exercise, and because the lack of conversation means quite a tense atmosphere in the car, it really can make for an interesting session.

Last time I did a mock test, my pupil aproached a T junction far too quickly. Normally, I'd have sorted him out, but because it was a mock, I had to give him a chance to sort it out for himself, and so I've ended up hitting the brakes hard and late to stop him driving straight out in front of another vehicle. (actually, even if the vehicle hadn't been coming, I'd have stopped him anyway) This really shook the poor bugger up. I made a grown man cry! And eventually, we had to finish the lesson early and I drove him home.

But this mock led to a very good lesson next time round. He's a far better driver as a result of it.

Because I use the mock to find faults, everybody fails. How they fail forms the basis for future lessons, but everyone fails.

Until today.

Having bigged up the mock, and pointed out that nobody ever passes, my pupil, Leanne, went out today in a brand new car that she'd never driven before, and did almost everything perfectly, and nothing o badly as to incur a serious fault.

She cried too. And gave me a big hug.

Awwwwww.

To B or not to B

s a driving instructor,




it's appropriate that I've arrived at a kind of crossroads in my life.

As a driver, I'd deal with such things as crossroads in good time and be prepared for whatever was there well in advance. If only things were that simple. In fact I procrastinated, and did almost nothing, until inertia chose my route for me.

Still a choice, I suppose, choosing to do nothing, but it did limit my options.

Every 4 years, us instructors have to give the government £300 for the priviledge of doing our jobs. My license expires today, and a new one had to be arranged if I was to continue teaching.

At the same time, my car lease was due to expire in a few weeks. If I chose to teach, I'd be locking myself into a 2 year lease on a dual controlled car.

So, these things together meant that if I'd wanted to go in a different direction, this was probably the time to do it.

And I have considered doing that. Being a driving instructor has not been that rewarding financially. The job, like almost any job, has become mundane. The benefits of not having to do a 9-5 shift with a boss telling me what to wear and how to act have to be set against the effort and responsibility of doing it all for myself. As Bren said when she hoovered carpets in our local bowling alley, you turn up, you do what you're paid to do, and you go home. Easy.

I did enquire about becoming a driving examiner. They are civil servants. They work for the Driving Standards Agency. It seemed like a logical progression, but they're not taking on new examiners right now. My name is on file, they say.

But that's all I did, and so in due course, I did what I needed to do, and I'm now set to be an instructor for the next couple of years at least. I'm now licensed until the end of July 2014, and I've got a shiny new Ford Fiesta sitting outside.

There are worse jobs. I've had some of them.

This, by the way, is my hundredth post of 2010. I hope that somewhere in there I've had something to say.

And I've almost completed my Google Earth alphabet (upper case) too.

Bravo!

But now, basically I'm bogged down betwixt and between a bevvy of beautiful B's.

It's a bugger of a burden to bear.

Do I brighten things with this beauty from Ulan Bator?



Or do I bat that into oblivion, and base it upon this, between Biggleswade and Baldock?



Blimey!

Both are abstract, but they are each recognisably B's, at least to an extent that I'm happy with. I know I'm going to use one or the other. So now seems a good time to recap on my methodology.

It would have been fairly easy to just find shapes, or even real letters that I found. But I set myself some rules, some of which I've occasionally bent or broken (are you listening, Q?)

They are:

• I can't use real letters, such as those painted on airport runways. That also rules out things like the letters from the famous "HOLLYWOOD" sign.

• The letter has to be both whole and constrained. For example, if I found a particularly bendy bit of road, I couldn't use it as an S or a N, because the road would continue beyond the letter.

• Less of a rule, and more of a convention, I have to try to make each letter come from different places and different... well... things I suppose. So if I found the letters Z, F, W, L and P in the bunkers of a golf course, I would try to use just one of them, especially if they were all from the same golf course.
  

The boundary line making the Mongolian B continues away somewhere else, making it something other than a B. So I'm going to have to choose the British B, because the shores of the lake form a boundary consistent with rule 2. And besides, it's between Baldock and Biggleswade, on the border of Bedfordshire.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
1234567890

There are some things money just can't buy...

First things first. This morning one of my pupils had her driving test. She failed because of two serious faults. One was the subject of a previous post. The other was because she tried to emerge to the right from a T junction at the same time as a vehicle from her left turned right into the side road she was emerging from. She ended up stopping in the middle of the road. The examiner reckoned she should have waited. She reckoned they didn't signal right until the last moment.

After that, I had a lesson with a lady who has her test in a couple of days. I wanted her to reverse around a corner, and we went here...



See? Lot's of options. This is the kind of road examiners use, because if there's a parked car at one corner, they can use the next one, or the next...

Because I wanted her to do it for herself, I amused myself with making anagrams of the road names. Durban Road is an anagram of "A dour Brand". Glencoe Road is an anagram of "Eagle Condor"

Just thought I'd give you a little insight into the care and attention I put into my job :o)

This afternoon, I did a complete pass plus course. I used my usual complete pass plus course, going to Glossop and the Snake Pass.

The pub I usually schedule a meal break for was shut. Not a problem. I already knew it would be, and I had a plan B ready and waiting.

The Grouse Inn between Glossop and Hayfield.

That was shut up tight too.

OK. We'd passed any number of hostelries offering home cooked food on our way. So we tried another in New Mills. It may well serve food on Mondays, but it didn't open until 5pm. We weren't going to sit twiddling our thumbs for an hour, so we got on with driving.

I took a diversion from our normal route and went through a place called Charlesworth.

This was a fantastic part of the drive. The road was the sort of thing they use for car adverts. The scenery was breathtaking. I intend to go back there with my significant other and take a nice walk. Soon.

We ended up in Marple Bridge, which had a pub, which advertised food, and it's doors were open.

We ended up just having coke, because they don't serve food on Mondays. Cant' blame them really. The place was empty. The only other people apart from staff were an elderly couple who walked in as we were leaving. I had a fag in the car park and they came back out again. I heard them say "Well we'll just have to have fish and chips then".

I gave up. You can't buy pub food in rural Derbyshire on a monday afternoon. End of.

We drove around the north of Manchester in a spectacular hailstorm. (bad weather pass plus module nirvana) before heading back on the East Lancs.

But then things got really dangerous. We were heading west into the setting sun on wet roads, and it was almost impossible to see what was happening ahead. I got us off the road at a budget food pub near Haydock on the outskirts of Liverpool, and we spent half an hour killing two birds (getting the promised meal sorted, and giving the sun time to fuck off out of the sky)

Seriously. If you can't see where you're going, don't go.

I'm on Google Street View!

Not got time to post much. Got stuff to do. Just a quick pic...



It's near Mannings Lane South / Long Lane / Greenfields Lane, on the outskirts of Chester if you're interested in seeing for yourself.

Pass Plus

When you've passed your driving test, you can go on to do a further brief course that covers things you may not have encountered on your driving lessons. In particular, when available, this means motorway driving, but there are other modules as well.

In return for taking the extra lessons, some insurance companies will reduce your premium, often by far more than the course costs you.

The government subsidise this scheme. The taxpayer pays for people to become better drivers, and it seems that although everybody has to pay a small amount of extra tax, society as a whole benefits from fewer accidents and a higher overall standard of driving.

The winners of course, are as follows:

• Us instructors, who get extra work, more money, and a bit of variety in our jobs.

• New drivers, particularly those in high risk groups.

• The insurance companies themselves, who get money from the government to incentivise this scheme.

• Society as a whole because of fewer accidents and a higher overall standard of driving.

The losers are:

• Taxpayers! I'm trying to find the figures on how much the subsidy actually is, but the figure has not yet yielded to my queries. I have e-mailed the Driving Standards Agency for more information. I'd imagine the figure amounts to several million pounds, which sounds a lot until you divide it by the number of taxpayers. Until I get a response, I suppose it's possible that the insurance companies themselves pay for the scheme, because it shows statistically that pass-plussed drivers are less likely to have an accident.
  

The Pass Plus course covers town driving, driving on rural roads, driving at night, driving in bad weather, dual carriaqeways and motorways. As I've mentioned, I place a lot of emphasis on motorways, because I tend to make sure the other elements have been covered thoroughly, well before my pupil passes their test.

There is a syllabus, but there are no hard and fast rules about how much time is devoted to any given element, nor how that time should be broken down. Typically, one of my forms may show that 8 hours have been covered, but that's because there is overlap. An hour spent driving on a motorway, in the dark, in the pissing rain, may show up on the report sheet as 3 seperate hours.

How people choose to divide the time is done by negotiation between the pupil and myself. I encourage people to do it in one big lump, although I'm happy to do it as 2 blocks of 3 hours, or 3 blocks of 2 hours, or even at a push, 4 blocks of 90 minutes.

Why one huge 6 hour drive?

Well, firstly, from my point of view, it makes very efficient use of my time. I'm not spending time travelling from place to place to do that 6 hours of work.

Secondly, it allows a lot more scope for where we go and what we do. You can go a long way in a 6 hour journey. So that allows me to turn the pass plus into a sort of adventure day. We go somewhere a bit exotic, like the Peak District or Snowdonia, rather than the familiar roads of Wirral. Such a trip covers extensive use of the motorway network, rural roads, including some pretty challenging roads like the Snake Pass, busy town centres in places like Stockport and Warrington, and Dual Carriageways like the East Lancs Road.

Obviously, driving for 6 hours is a big task. You could easily travel from Birmingham to Glasgow in that time, and you wouldn't do such a journey without taking a break, so I make sure we take a couple of breaks. I buy my pupil lunch in some country pub, about half way through the course, and we do put other stops in along the way. One of my favourites is the Snake Pass Inn, just off, you guessed it... The Snake Pass. They do a wild mushroom and asparagus risotto that's just to die for, dahlings.

And that's what I've been up to this afternoon and evening.

M53 - M56 - Assorted city roads through Stockport - Various rural roads to Glossop - Snake Pass - Lunch - Snake Pass - M60 - M67 - A580 - All kinds of stuff through Warrington, Widnes and Runcorn - M56 - Some horrible pitch black country lanes around Neston - Back to Birkenhead along the M53.

And today has been easy. The time flew by. I was with an enthusiastic and competent driver, who I've really enjoyed teaching. The roads were generally fairly quiet. The lesson flowed along beautifully, and before we knew it, we were back home filling in a form.

It's not always that straightforward. When I'm teaching, I'm concentrating on what's going on around me just as much as if I was behind the wheel myself, and I'm also paying close attention to everything my pupil is doing. - Another reason why I wouldn't do a 6 hour session without putting breaks in.

When the going is tougher - When the roads are more challenging, when my pupil is less able or confident, when I have less of a rapport with the person I'm with, the time can drag far more. Not everyone can deal with the 6 hour course, and every single person I've done this with has had times where their standard of driving has deteriorated. I do have pupils that I wouldn't attempt this with.

Today has been a fine day's work well done by both my pupil and myself. Here's to many more.

Reading Road Markings...

You're driving from Left to Right approaching this junction, and have been asked to turn right at the end of the road. It's your driving test and you're nervous. If you're a driver, you can appreciate that this is not a straightforward junction. You're actually dealing with a T junction that joins a one way street, and then immediately dealing with turning right at the end of that one way street. The situation is made slightly more complex by the junction on the left abutting the first bit of the junction.



Ultimately, you're trying to go from the first yellow arrow to the second, and there are several ways of getting this wrong, as well as the usual ways of doing a junction wrongly.

First of all, you're initially going down a two-way road, but ahead of you, you can see a one way street. So it's easy to assume that you're already on a one way street. Moving onto the wrong side of the road before you get to the first part of the junction is the commonest way of failing here. And the examiners do have to fail you for it. You're driving down the wrong side of the road on approach to quite a blind corner. If someone turned left into the street from the one way bit, you could have a head on collision. The clue is the dotted lines at the end of the road. There's a double row on the left hand side of the road, but only a single row on the right hand side.

The second way of bollocking this up is to treat the whole thing as two-way. You get the first bit right, but then you incorrectly keep to the left lane as you turn right at the end. This is less dangerous, but the examiners will still mark it as a serious driving fault. You can tell it's the end of a one way street because the double row of dotted lines extend across the full width of the junction, and there are two give way triangles, one in each lane.

Thirdly and finally, you can attempt to turn right at the end of the first bit instead of the second, heading the wrong way into a one way street. There are some nice red no entry signs to help you avoid doing this, but should you miss them, you've got a good chance of smashing head on into a bus. The examiner would probably mark this as a reason to fail you.

Belt Up.

Near Death Experience...

Joining a main road from a sliproad can be a dangerous and daunting task. One of my pupils got it very wrong today and nearly crashed.

(click to enlarge)

On this picture, we're travelling from the bottom right corner of the screen, joining the road heading towards the left hand side of the screen. We're travelling at close to the 40 mile per hour limit, and there's a car quite close behind us. On the main road, there's just one car, quite a long way back from the junction, but travellling quite a lot faster than the speed limit.

My pupil has a look over his shoulder, and sees the car in the distance, then has a couple of looks in his door mirror, but is unable to see the car. At this point, I don't know the car is there, and I'm concentrating on trying to get my pupil to give himself a wider field of view in his door mirror by leaning forward in his seat. As we approach the give way lines, I look to the side to find the car is almost alongside us. I immediately brake firmly and take hold of the wheel to stop my pupil from attemting to steer to the right. At the same moment, the car on the main road swerves sharply right to avoid us, and we miss each other. The person following us also has to brake sharply, and once things have sorted themselves out, he overtakes us on the main road. The driver of that car clearly thought it was the car on the main road that was at fault, and to an extent, he was.

There were two lanes available, and he was the only car on the road. He should have read the situation, checked his mirrors, and moved over into the outside lane. That would have allowe dthe traffic on the sliproad to safely join the main road. He was also travelling far too fast. Perhaps 60 miles per hour in a 40 limit.

But at the end of the slip road, there are give way lines. Drivers coming that way must give way to oncoming traffic. So we were at fault too. Perhaps, if an accident had occurred, we would have been liable.

The two things you need to do to emerge safely from a situation like this are, firstly, to be aware of what's going on around you. This specifically means what's going on behind you, and what's happening on the road you're trying to join. and secondly, you need to be travelling at an appropriate speed for the situation.

The first of these means good mirrorwork on approach, and early observations, backed up by further brief observations as you approach. Looking over your right shoulder can give a good idea of what's happening, and in a situation like this, the road you're joining is often not going to be covered by an ordinary look in your door mirror. There are a couple of problems with looking over your shoulder though. You're body twists around to the right, and this can cause you to turn the steering wheel to the right as well, which makes the car veer dangerously out of it's lane. Also, if you're looking over your shoulder, while driving forward, and something happens in front of you, well you're just going to smash straight into whatever it is, because you won't know it's happened.

The highway code recommends a glance over your shoulder as you approach the road you want to join.

Your door mirror will not really tell you what's going on on the road you're joining if you're sat back in your seat. If you lean forward in your seat, you get a wider field of view, and you still have some awareness, through peripheral vision, of what's going on ahead of you. Because you lean forward but your body is straight, the steering isn't affected as much.

If you're joining traffic that's travelling at speed, you also need to be travelling at speed if possible. If you're attempting to join a stream of traffic that's moving at 70 miles per hour, and you're doing only 30 miles per hour, you're allowing cars to close with you at a relative speed of 40 miles per hour. If you're doing 70 miles per hour as you join, then the gap you're moving into moves with you.

Ultimately, what happened today was my fault. My pupil is at test standard. He's not a learner except in the sense that all of us are. I'd assumed he'd be able to deal with the situation comfortably, so I didn't brief him about it beforehand.

Live and learn.