Bamboo
New member
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2009
- Messages
- 2,689
- MBTI Type
- XXFP
Depends on what you mean by "bad driver" ...I think I may be a stereotypical SP in that my driving skills are excellent but as a younger person I drove too fast. My reflexes are incredible, I once was doing 100 on the Triangle Beltline in NC and did a 360 in the middle of the freeway and kept such a firm grip on my car that I just turned forward and drove away without a scratch.
I've also flipped a car into a ditch and back on to its tires on a back country road at night, and kept driving to my friends' house.
Kids, don't try this at home. I have no idea how I'm alive.
I like you.
If I'm honest about my personality in my teens and early twenties, I see pretty clearly an SP who could barely to stand to go to her classes in high school and avoided college until her mid-twenties, who flew by the seat of her pants and is probably alive due to animal reflexes and sheer dumb luck.
This doesn't sound like anyone I know at all.
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I drove probably 9000 miles last year? Maybe more.
I consider myself an above average driver - while I do consider navigation to be an important skill, I think the most important skills in determining what is a good driver are:
- accident avoidance - safety first
based in:
- situational awareness
- communication and anticipation
- maneuvering skills
I'm constantly refining my driving techniques. After watching a series of crash videos on youtube, I've realized that knowing the lay of the land is critical when something goes wrong - you need to know what's up. Whenever I'm on the highway I try to practice reading the terrain, and I've developed my own nomenclature to describe my environment.
For instance:
"Center 3, to 4 with a merge clear, Jersey and open, pulling two left, Acura on the right crunch, anchor ahead far, with a clear horizon" would indicate:
- I'm in the center lane on 3 lane road.
- 1 lane is merging in, but no cars are coming in
- (read left to right), there is a Jersey (hard concrete wall) on the left shoulder and open grass or similar on the right
- In the left lane there are two cars behind me which are coming to pass (moving faster than I am)
- In the right lane there is an Acura aligned with my fender. A passing car will go from pulling, crunching, to pushing, from my perspective.
- anchor means a car (or truck) with a constant rate of speed, probably slower than me, in my lane, far varies but usually more than 10 seconds.
- clear horizon means low traffic, a bumpy horizon is a lot of traffic. similar wording for "rearview" - ie. "bumpy rear."
By doing this scanning constantly, I'm able to train myself to assess what's going on around me quickly because I'm learning to fill in the information in a standardized fashion, eventually possibly even unconsciously.
Also, by making up this nomenclature I've started to assess specific situations more closely, creating sets of sub-routines for merging, having cars merge in, predicting behavior, changing lanes, etc.
All said and done, I still like to screw around.