She who hesitates

Firstly, congratulations to Ali and Steven on passing their tests this week. It made it 8 passes out 10 tests in the week for me. And it was nice to see Ali out driving this morning (even if he didn't see me).

I've previously mentioned the tracker-gadget-thingy which provides me with all manner of trivial statistics about people visiting this site. Sometimes it gives me useful information, but, more often than not, the statistics it provides are just of curiosity value. Recently, I seem to be getting lots of people from various European countries coming here after searching for 'Swindon's magic roundabout'. Why this may be of interest to people in Belgium, Poland, Austria, Sweden and several other countries I can't imagine.
But it was someone who recently visited this blog after going to a search engine and searching for  'how do you teach a driving pupil about hesitation?' that caught my attention. A tough question, and I would not like to try to answer it in any depth here. With some pupils it is never an issue; if anything, I find that some pupils are not cautious enough. But it is the ones that seem to want to triple-check, when it is clear they are able to 'go', that can be a challenge.
I had one such pupil this morning. She has been with me for quite a while. Manoeuvres are good, control is good, observations rarely need to be remarked upon. But the only thing I regularly have to prompt her on is "is it safe to go?" Whether it is emerging from a give-way, crossing traffic or moving on after waiting behind an obstruction (such as a parked car), she is over-cautious and often ends up stopped, in first gear and waiting for a big gap before she thinks it is safe to go. 'What's wrong with that?' you may ask. Not only may the oncoming cars be holding back slighlty, expecting her to go, but the vehicles behind her may assume she will go and misjudge their braking. Also, if vehicles are already stopped behind someone who is too hesitant, they may get frustrated and rush to overtake before they get a safe opportunity.
I usually find that my pupils miss opportunities to go if they approach the junction/situation too quickly; then they are still braking at the point where they should be looking to see if they can accelerate. Getting them to bring their speed down in good time works wonders because, having done most of the braking early, they then have a few seconds to look at the junction and decide whether it is safe to go.
I teach my pupils to try and drive in a manner that doesn't cause other road users to change their speed or direction. That's fine in principle, but sometimes hard for them to judge, so instructors try to use 'knowledge transfer' - apply what they do know to something they don't. For example, when a pupil is approaching a side road to turn right, if they look like they will hesitate and wait for an oncoming vehicle when they have plenty of time to cross, I could ask "If you were a pedestrian, would you think it is safe to walk across the road here?" The theory being that they will have had experience as a pedestrian and will be able to judge whether it is safe. If they think it is safe to walk across, they will have time to drive across.
This happened to my pupil this morning. She was approaching a road to turn right. She had checked her mirrors, indicated, braked and was selecting 2nd gear when she began to brake more. I realised that she had seen the oncoming car (which was some distance away) and was going to wait until it had passed...
"Do you have time to walk across before that car?" I prompted.
No answer, She selected 1st gear and stopped, waited until the car had passed, then I had to tell her it was safe to go because I could see she was looking at another oncoming car which was even further away. I asked her to pull over and repeated my question...
"Did you not think you had time to safely walk across the road before that first car?"
"Hmmmm. Probably not."
"Really?! We had to wait some time before the car passed us. I think I could have comfortably walked across in plenty of time." I suggested.
"I'm a nervous pedestrian." was her response. I had no answer to that.