New vs experienced drivers

I’d like to talk about ’N’ or ‘L’ drivers. You hear so much these days about how terrible they are at driving. I have a different perspective.

My 16 year old daughter got her ‘L’ three months ago. She has been working hard at learning the rules of the road. She insists that cellphones are off in the car. She is not a timid driver or an aggressive driver, but is actually becoming quite confident, which can be quite daunting in Kelowna traffic. 

She has saved up to purchase her own car so that she can learn in the vehicle that she will be driving. We have done countless trips into town at various times of day to get her accustomed to traffic. I think she’s going to do pretty well. 

So here’s my issue. In just one little snapshot of our drive today, we encountered countless terrible drivers (it is Kelowna after all, not hard to find those). This morning, she did her first early morning commute driving to school. We had the ‘L’ on the rear of the car. She was driving the speed limit, and in all honesty traffic was quite slow, so speeding wasn’t an issue. Yet we had one lady tailgate our bumper all the way down Benvoulin onto Casorso and down to the lights at Gordon.

She was so close in her fancy Escalade that maybe she didn’t see the ‘L’. It is kind of hard to see when you are in our back seat. We were not slowing traffic, we were in it. My daughter kept saying “Why is she tailgating? She can’t get anywhere any faster?”

I said not to worry, that we were doing just fine. We turned left onto Gordon, turning correctly into the left lane. The woman behind us turned left into the right lane (wrong) and proceeded to blow by us at three times the speed limit. 

We caught up to her at the next light. 

Looked right into her vehicle and saw her three young kids. I thought to myself: “I certainly hope that her kids won’t have to learn to drive from her.”

The moral of the story is that our new drivers are learning from our older more experienced drivers and we aren’t doing so well teaching them the right way. Get off their backs, and their bumpers! An ‘L’ is there to inform you that they are learning. Learning from their co-pilot and from other drivers on the road!

Chris Hill