WHY NO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN CALIFORNIA WHYYYYYYYY

January 2, 2007 11:50 PM

I'd like to learn to drive as quickly as possible. How can I expedite the process?

I'm a 23 year old dude who never learned to drive due to epilepsy. After moving to Southern California, I found out that I do in fact need a car. So, I have just gotten my doctor to sign off that I am safe to drive. I've puttered around in parking lots, and I plan to take the written test next week.

My goals are twofold:
1) muster the skills to pass the road test as quickly as possible
2) learn to drive semi-safely, as i need to transport myself to work as soon as possible

Suggestions for services or other ideas that can make this a FAST process? Bonus points If someone can think of a way to learn enough to pass the road test by the end of the month.

posted by wuzandfuzz to travel & transportation (22 answers total)

If this is the Southern California that I know (and on occasion love), you're going to get yourself killed by trying to half-ass this.
On second thought, you might be just as well prepared as the rest of them on the road.
Keen grasp of the obvious: The kind of car you're going to be driving should be an automatic, not a standard.
posted by lilithim at 11:53 PM on January 2, 2007

Sunday afternoons in the suburbs with someone who knows how to drive well.

The thing about driving is it really does take experience to be a good driver. Just about any idiot teenager can get behind the wheel and pilot their parents beamer to school and back.

The big thing about driving is having the motor-memory and experience/instinct to know how to react quickly and safely when someone does something stupid on the road (you will find this happens a lot)

So for not only your own safety, but for the safety of everyone else on the already crazy So-Cal freeways, take some time and do this righ.

P.S: We have fantastic public transport in San Francisco, which also happens to be in California. :-)
posted by dantekgeek at 12:17 AM on January 3, 2007

SF public transit's ok (although I'm finding it a bit expensive & I hate that it doesn't run 24 hours). But public transit in Southern California? Hee! That's funny!

What area are you going to be driving in? LA? San Diego? Orange County?
posted by miss lynnster at 12:28 AM on January 3, 2007

Get a professional instructor, and spend every minute you possibly can doing nothing but driving them about.
posted by flabdablet at 12:31 AM on January 3, 2007

yeah, it's something that is only going to take practice practice practice to learn how to do well, the basic mechanics are pretty simple, and driving on a salt flat is a piece o cake, but when you add many many people to the mix, there is nothing but time that will make you good, and that is if you don't a) end up in a bad accident, b) become one of the bad drivers. good luck
posted by edgeways at 12:42 AM on January 3, 2007

For further clarfication, I will be driving from Calabasas to Camarillo, hopefully avoiding the nastiest driving in west LA and inward.

For the record, I am trying to obtain my license as quickly as possible so that I can practice more; I don't know anyone around here really, and my girlfriend is too busy with law school to devote a lot of time to teaching me.

I hope to learn by driving by myself on weekends, and once a week to work, slowly driving more and more days over a few months until I feel I am competent. So, no, I am not trying to half-ass this, but I feel one of my few affordable options for learning to drive is teaching myself in this controlled manner.

Any other ideas with these new limitations in mind?
posted by wuzandfuzz at 12:56 AM on January 3, 2007

I think you're really going about it the hard way by teaching yourself. Having someone else in the car that is an experienced driver (whether it's a friend or paid teacher) is essential. They can point out things that you are doing wrong, tell you what to look out for in the approaching flow of traffic, talk you down out of high stress situations, etc. If you're just alone and new at driving I think you will end up taking much longer to get confident as you won't have that level of feedback and guidance, you'll just be doing the same stuff over and over and eventually figuring out what works well and what doesn't.

So I guess if you can't rope in anyone you know to help then what I'm saying is the paid instructor route is something to seriously consider.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:38 AM on January 3, 2007

I forgot to add:

At the beginning, you should be very mindful of distractions. You are used to being in cars with people driving while they talk, listen to the radio, read (!!), eat, drink/sip, fiddle with the controls, etc. But that level of multitasking can only possibly work when the driving has been honed to an instinct through experience and muscle memory, and even then it can still be extremely dangerous. So make sure to heed distractions with great caution at the beginning. Set the climate controls before you start moving so you don't have to fiddle. Don't even think of listenting to the radio or CD, or talking on a cell phone while you try to learn to drive. You need to focus entirely on what's happening on the road at the beginning stage of learning, there is simply not enough room in your mind to be able to comprehend other tasks yet.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:44 AM on January 3, 2007

The other danger is that if you are doing most of this "driving experience" by commuting, then you are very likely to fall into the "autopilot" trap which is especially dangerous when you are just learning to drive. I was an absolutely lousy driver just starting out and I needed loads and loads of real driving experience before I got better. And I didn't really get better until I stopped doing my normal to-and-fro school commute.
posted by Deathalicious at 2:01 AM on January 3, 2007

To start, drive an automatic if you can. A manual can be a real bother and adds a lot of stress when you are just learning the rules of the road. Secondly, be very mindful of driving around with just a permit! In the state of California it is illegal to NOT have someone in the car with you that has a license and if you do get pulled over, it will seriously impede your ability to get your license in the near future.
posted by Holy foxy moxie batman! at 2:04 AM on January 3, 2007

There's really no substitute for having a proper instructor in the car when you're learning. They're not just a good driver, they're a good teacher, and will be able to stop you from getting into bad habits or making mistakes that a normal person might miss.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:55 AM on January 3, 2007

If you can find a privately owned place, such as a school or business, that has a complex of parking lots, connecting roads, drop offs and loops, and is closed at night or on weekends, go there and just tool around, practice parking, driving in reverse, stopping before turns, etc.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:04 AM on January 3, 2007

When I was learning to drive, I thought I was doing pretty well until I went to turn right and the instructor slammed on the brake (it was a dual control teaching car). I'd been just about to disobey a red arrow traffic light that I hadn't even seen, and without the instructor's quick action I could well have ended up T-boned.

Trying to do it all yourself is doing it half-assed and could get you killed.

Actually operating the car is the easy part. Learning how to cope with traffic is what you need the instructor's vastly superior experience to make safe.
posted by flabdablet at 3:51 AM on January 3, 2007

Commuter driving is almost entirely a risk reduction endeavor. The only upside to doing it is that you might be able to hold a job farther away than the distance you could comfortably walk or bike to work. The downside is that you could be killed or you could kill some one else doing it, or create serious life long injury and economic hardship for yourself or other people. Ultimately, the risks you run for the benefit you get in this situation are outlandishly negative to you. So, the only way to even the odds is to become a terriffic driver, and to do everything you can to improve your odds of remaining accident free, each time you drive.

Clearly, professional instruction and supervised practice is vital. If you are a very fast learner, with excellent muscle memory, and a thorough grasp of how cars work, and the physics of friction, you might become compentent to obtain a learner's permit with the basics of what the California DMV recommends for high school student driver training: 30 hours of classroom instruction and 6 hours of instructor supervised driving in a dual control automobile. That would not make you a competent driver in commute type traffic, it would just qualify you to take the test for a learner's permit, which would enable you to drive for a period of time under the supervision of other licensed drivers, while you practice and build your experience. If you're buying your own insurance for your own car, you'll want to check into what approved driver training means to you financially on insurance rates as a young driver, but I think you'll find the premium difference is so great, you can't afford not to take professional driver training.

To get to a point of any real proficiency as a driver, you'll need perhaps a hundred hours of driving time (if you are very coordinated and a fast learner), under optimum conditions that include driving under various road and weather conditions, in various cars, doing all the common driving tasks involved in negotiating traffic. At road speeds, that is still under 10K miles of driving, which is nothing in terms of real world driving experience. As a novice driver, you'll be frightened much of the time in traffic, and you'll be making silly mistakes that are obvious to other drivers, many of whom will be angered by your poor driving, and let you know about it. As the AAA puts it:

"Novice drivers experience serious crash losses far beyond their representation in the driver population or their proportion of mileage driven. As a group they take between five and seven years to reach mature risk levels."

The reasons for this are cited by the AAA as:

"New drivers lack important skills, particularly those needed to acquire and process information. They are less able to maintain full attention and less likely to take in the information they need from the driving environment. They are not as good as experienced drivers in scanning the environment, recognizing potential hazards while they are still at a safe distance, and making tough decisions quickly. They tend to underestimate the danger of certain risky situations and overestimate the danger in others.

Improved skills alone are not sufficient to ensure new driver safety, however. The safety effects of good driving skills appear to be offset by overconfidence and increased exposure to risk. Better-trained novice drivers become licensed sooner and drive more, in part because of their own increased confidence, but also because their parents often give them more freedom to drive.

Novice Drivers' Choices and Behavior

Crashes are caused by what drivers choose to do as much as by what they are able (or unable) to do. Most of novice drivers' increased risk comes from inappropriate behavior -- deliberately taking risky actions, seeking stimulation, driving at high speeds, and driving while impaired. Compared to more experienced drivers, novice drivers more often choose to drive too fast and follow other vehicles too closely. They run yellow lights more, accept smaller gaps in traffic, and allow less room for safety. As a result of their choices, and perhaps because of skill deficiencies as well, they have more rear-end crashes and run-off-the-road crashes than experienced drivers. "

And finally, given that you do have epilepsy, even if it is well controlled, your medical status may well come up in any situation where you do have an accident. Whether or not your condition contributed to the situation, it may well become a point of further investigation, and represent a barrier to obtaining affordable insurance coverage thereafter. So, fair or not, your goals need to be not just becoming minimally compentent to drive as soon as you can, but as skilled as you can be to avoid any kind of incident in your early going, in the time you have to train and prepare.
posted by paulsc at 5:46 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

I hope to learn by driving by myself on weekends, and once a week to work, slowly driving more and more days over a few months until I feel I am competent.

Get an instructor now. You can't teach yourself traffic laws and driving techniques you don't know about. Not only that, you shouldn't even be driving without someone else in the car until you pass the road test. If there's anything that'll keep you from becoming a licensed driver ASAP, it's getting pulled over without a license.
posted by phatkitten at 7:15 AM on January 3, 2007

Hey, Calabasas! Don't hit my in-laws! Or maybe...no, just kidding.

Get out to as rural an area as you can until you get the basics down. It's so much easier to get the feel for the car and road when you don't have to worry much about traffic. Once you've perfected it, then you can take on the screamin' freeways of the Golden State. But learning in those quiet, dead spaces will serve you well.
posted by GaelFC at 7:41 AM on January 3, 2007

Speaking as someone who learned to drive in three days in Southern California when I was older than you, failed my first test because I had no freaking idea what I was doing, passed two days later with the same instructor, and was terrified for months afterward behind the wheel... please don't rush yourself into a dangerous situation. You do have public transportation options. Metrolink goes to Camarillo--couldn't you take a bus up Topanga to the station in Chatsworth?
posted by Scram at 9:21 AM on January 3, 2007

I learned to drive at 15 and got into an accident at 16. It wasnt till recently, when I started driving a 20-minute commute every day, that I consider myself anywhere near a safe driver.

Get an instructor. He'll take you from puttering to road driving in an hour, and to freeway driving in 3 or 4. You'll still be horrible, but at least you won't be going 35 mph down I-410.
posted by muddgirl at 9:24 AM on January 3, 2007

Practice, practice, practice. Take driving very seriously and commit to learning to drive very safely.

Practice: Find someone who will take you out driving, esp in large empty lots, as often and for as long as possible. Take a Driver Ed. course.

Safety: If you cause an accident, your insurance rates go way up, and stay there for a while, so do it for financial reasons if not for anything else.
posted by theora55 at 10:15 AM on January 3, 2007

Just so you know, driving on a highway requires a slightly different skill set than driving on regular roads. Make sure you practice both, especially if you're in the LA area. Until you get comfortable I would say do not try to drive on the highways alone, and try to avoid rush hour. Also, pay attention while you're a passenger. Look out for road signs, try to judge braking distances, even carry out the foot motions. The brake is your friend. If you're ever uncertain or nervous, your foot should be on it ready to stop. And please, please use your turn signal every time, it'll put you ahead of the game in SoCal.
posted by SBMike at 10:54 AM on January 3, 2007

(FWIW, I learned how to drive about 30 minutes north of Washington DC.)

I'd seriously recommend an instructor. Both the paid professional kind and someone who you feel comfortable with. The process I went through was to take the written test for my learner's permit. Then I had signed up for the 30 hour classroom time+6 hours professional in-car instruction time. According to MD law, I also had to complete 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent/guardian/someone over the age of 25? who had their license for longer than 3 years. And even though a majority of my friends cheated on their 40 hours with their folks, my dad *insisted* that I do the entire 40 hours (it has now been increased to 60 hours). They had it broken down, for how many hours you should spend on each "type" of driving.
Here's how it breaks down (from what I remember, and may be incorrect): 10 hours of driving at night, 5 hours of light speed driving, 5 hours of moderate speed driving, 5 hours of high speed driving, 5 hours of adverse condition driving (aka rain/snow/wintry mix) plus a bunch of time spent parking and practicing 3-point turns. Here's a link to the MD Rookie Driver guide, which is what everyone gets a copy of when they pass their learner's permit test. It gives a detailed breakdown of procedures to follow and a whole lot of other important information.

Tooling around in a parking lot is a lot of fun, but you don't really learn how to drive until you're actually out there, in real time traffic. But something that might also help you is to try driving other things (in my case: riding mowers, motorcycles, bicycles, bobcats) in a controlled situation (in my case, the backyard) because it can help give you a sense of how steering works, how to avoid obstacles, etc. It's not exactly the same as driving a car/van/truck, but it can help.

Good luck. Driving's a bitch sometimes, but it gives you a lot of freedom.

And a tip for parallel parking from my in-car instructor which works much better with automatic mirrors: turn the mirror on the side of the car that is closest to the curb completely downward. It helps you see the curb and how far away/close you are to it much easier.

(FTR, I've had my license since I was 17, driven a number of vehicles, and passed my learner's permit and both driver's licensing tests on the first try.)
posted by sperose at 11:53 AM on January 3, 2007

So, this is about a million years too late and hopefully you have your license by now, but in case you don't - you may want to look into instructors who have experience teaching racing-style driving. I was a phobic driver (despite growing up in Southern CA I didn't get a license until I was almost 21 - I wanted a real ID, so I spent some of my scholarship stipend to hire myself a teacher) and this guy had seen it all. He was totally chill even as I was about to drive off the side of a freeway.

If you're nervous at all - and most everyone is - you need someone who's cool as a cucumber in the passenger seat. Who better than a guy who spends half the year in Germany and Italy teaching people how to drive safely at lethal speeds?

I don't know how you would find such an instructor, unfortunately - I just lucked into mine. I took my first lessons from regular instructors (at Valley Bob's, which you may have considered as an option - I grew up about five minutes from Calabasas, just on the other side of the 101) and found them uninspiring and impatient. The racing instructor really made me feel like the difficulties I was having were normal and had so much experience that I trusted him when he told me "I know there's a good driver in you who just needs some practice to get out."
posted by crinklebat at 2:03 AM on February 3, 2007