DVSA is currently conducting trials on a new-style driving test. The changes being trialled are listed here:
I don’t have a particular problem with the first two, though I do have some niggles about the satnav thing. But that last one is a real no-no as far as I’m concerned.
At the moment a candidate is expected to do one manoeuvre from turn in the road, reverse around a corner, parallel park, and reverse bay park. Before independent driving was introduced, they used to have to do two of these manoeuvres on their tests. I always supported independent driving, but I wasn’t happy at the loss of the manoeuvre – I saw it as a dumbing down of the driving test. But what they are proposing now is that instead of a candidate having to do either a turn in the road or reverse around a corner, they’d have to either drive forward into a bay and reverse out of it, or reverse and rejoin traffic (parallel park and reverse bay park are still in there). A monkey could do those things.
Pupils struggle with the reverse around a corner, and it is a significant source of test failures. However, as per this article:
Ministers want to improve the driving test pass rate, which is languishing below 50 per cent.
There’s the rub! The proposed changes are not intended to improve the driving test. They’re intended to make it easier.
Personally, I cannot understand why DVSA would want to actually test someone on something as mundane as stopping on the right side of the road. All of my pupils get to do it at one time or another, usually when we’re pulling up outside their house; but sometimes when we’re going to do a parallel park on a particular road I use, or if I need to pull over urgently and talk about something and there’s nowhere to do it on the left. I should also add that the roads we do it on are quiet urban roads – not busy A roads.
As usual, some instructors seem to be confused over what the Highway Code (HC) says. They are suggesting that it is illegal to park facing traffic so DVSA is wrong to ask candidates to do it. Here’s the actual HC wording:
Parking (rules 239 to 247)
Rule 239
Use off-street parking areas, or bays marked out with white lines on the road as parking places, wherever possible. If you have to stop on the roadside:
[rule continues]
- do not park facing against the traffic flow
The section this is in in the HC is titled “Parking”, and the first bullet point says “do not park…” The $64,000 question is: if you stop temporarily, are you parking? Look at the next rule:
Rule 240
You MUST NOT stop or park on:
[rule continues][rule continues]
- a road marked with double white lines, even when a broken white line is on your side of the road, except to pick up or set down passengers, or to load or unload goods
So, although Rule 240 says it is illegal (i.e. you MUST NOT) to park on a road with double white lines, you can stop to pick up or set down passengers, or to load/unload goods. Considering how that works in the real world, a lorry or van might stop and take up to 30 minutes – maybe more – to load or unload goods and not be breaking the Law, though if the same vehicle stopped and its driver went into the newsagents – even for less than a minute – then it would.
In Rule 239, though, there is no Law to break (i.e. do not). And since the distinction between stopping and parking has been made in Rule 240, it follows that pulling over to drop someone off (or to be tested on how well you do it) isn’t actually wrong. Even if you parked up and left your vehicle you wouldn’t be breaking any Law – you’d just be going against HC advice.
DVSA is not doing anything wrong in asking candidates to pull up on the right. It’s just so pointlessly simple an exercise that you have to question it as a replacement for the original manoeuvres.
But as I say, the government wants to increase the pass rate, and this is the way they’re going to do it.