STEPHEN HALEY
This is the best book I have ever read on the subject of road driving, and perhaps the most important that has ever been written. As early as page 14, author Stephen Haley says, "By now you will know that this book is unlike any other you will find on driving." There are 183 pages to go, and his claim holds true for all of them.
One of Hayley's central points is that passing the standard driving test is merely the beginning of the story. It allows you to drive without an instructor sitting beside you, but the techniques you have learned up to this point give only a very basic idea of how to drive.
This is already well-known. The problem is that most newly-passed drivers are not shown how to advance their skills from this point onwards. Too often the assumption is that they will learn by trial and error, but what if "error" means a major, expensive, damaging, perhaps injurious, possibly fatal road accident? There must be a better way.
In fact there are several better ways, but they all involve extra levels of instruction. Not everyone will have the inclination to use them, and making them compulsory for all the drivers in the country would be massively expensive. Everyone can, however, buy and read this book. I wish they would.
Haley deals with the subject brilliantly. First, he establishes that the most important outcome of any road journey is to arrive safely. He then assesses the current situation of road safety and the way it is affected by driving standards. After that, he breaks down the act of driving into eight core skills - beliefs, sense of danger, rules and regulations, learning from experience, fitness check, observation, risk assessment and control, and car control - and in most cases reduces each of these to its component parts, establishes the way in which they can be improved, and then rebuilds them in such a way that they become part of an expert driving technique.
I say "in most cases" because Haley devotes varying amounts of attention to each subject. By far the largest section in the book is the one devoted to risk assessment and control, which could almost be a book in itself except that it has to be seen as part of the bigger picture.
Haley has much less to say about rules, regulations and fitness checks, for the very good reason that these subjects are already dealt with in great detail elsewhere (the Highway Code, for example), and have to be well understood before the driving test can be passed.
