Motorway Driving

Following on from our article on Road Hogs we thought it might be a good idea to offer some general advice for drivers who get a little nervous driving on Motorways.

1) Go at YOUR speed. Just because the speed limit is 70 in most places doesn't mean you have to do that speed. Lorries are limited to 60mph so it's you can sit in the left hand lane if you like. We would however advise that you do not go on the motorway if you're not comfortable to drive at 45 mph or more because this could pose a danger to other road users.

2) When joining try to get up to a similar speed as the flow of traffic. This means that you should not go down the slip road at 20mph, the closer you are to the average speed the easier it will be to join.

3) ALWAYS look over your shoulder before moving out to overtake. This is to check your blindspot, there could quite easily be a car that you can't quite see. This is also one of the most common causes of accidents on the motorway, people who don't check their blindspot are endangering everyone else as well as themselves.

4)Don't worry about it. We can almost guarantee that driving on a motorway is easier than you think, once you've joined there's not really much else to it. Take your time and don't panic.

Driving on a motorway can be significantly quicker than taking the long way round so we'd recommend that you just try it, the key thing is that once you've done it once you should continue to do it so you get into the hang of it. Once you're confident you'll find that you open up a whole host of new places you can get to. Give it a try.

Date - 15/09/2006