At the test centre today, we arrived and parked in the usual place. Well, more or less.
At Chalfont Drive, it is customary to park with the centre on your left – facing towards the Beechdale Road end. Common sense would dictate that the first arrival parks as close to the gates as they can, and subsequent arrivals park sensibly backwards from there. This way, everyone – as many as eight tests go out at a time – gets a place to stop.
Unfortunately, an increasing number of instructors are trying to make life easy for their own pupils wihtout giving a thought for anyone else’s. You get them parking with 2 or more car-length gaps so their pupils can get out easily when the test starts. You get them parking away from the gate, even if they’re there first. Basically, they’re idiots who shouldn’t be submitting their pupils to test in the first place if they can’t drive out from behind another car without having a 15 metre gap to aid them (or if they don’t know the meaning of the phrase ‘convenient location’ when it comes to stopping).
Today it was even worse. It turned out there was someone waiting for test who’d been taught by her husband. They’d parked their car on the left side of the road – but facing the opposite way. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot – it’s almost a driver fault before they even get in the car!
And when she returned at the end - the examiner had obviously asked her to pull up on the left as they came in from the Beechdale end – she apparently deliberately parked it about half on the pavement! There was definitely something not right, because about 60 seconds later, the car reversed backwards, then parked properly on the road.
With the recession, an increasing number of people are turning up to test without having had any professional tuition. But it has to be false economy for many of them if they are making these sorts of mistakes. After all, time is money, so whoever is doing the ‘training’ has to value their time at nothing in order for this method to cost less than using an ADI. And the longer it goes on, the more bad habits have to be broken when they eventually do realise that they need to do it properly. One way or another, learning to drive costs money.
I also suspect that some of the people who fail when training by this route are driving illegally anyway in between times. International licence rules have a very flexible interpretation for some people.