I have made two attempts to learn to drive, both back in Russia. In both cases I only had a couple of months. I never really wanted to be able to drive, with the exception of those cases when my friends took me on long trips and I felt it was not fair that I wasn't driving so my friends could rest. However, I always did my best to entertain them with a conversation, or to keep them awake if it was late, and given how much I love to talk, that was always easy. Well, I also wanted to learn to drive so I could do it in case of an emergency.
I actually learned to drive, more or less. My instructor, with whom I had most of my classes back in Russia, was a young and enthusiastic man. He was a very good driver himself, and had training in extreme driving, which I could observe on one occasion when he was explaining something to me. His philosophy is that one should not teach people to drive in safe conditions and then leave them alone driving in a megapolis. As far as I feel from his teaching style, he correctly assumed that people learning to driver very slowly under very safe conditions will develop habits and responses, that is, a driving style, that would be totally inappropriate, and plainly dangerous, in a real-time situation. Therefore, he did his best to allow you to experience driving in a real environment, while he was making sure that both of you will survive the experience.
Most roads in Russia lack any marking. In this case, the rules say, drivers have to determine the number of lanes in each direction by themselves. Well, I had a lot of difficulty even determining the middle of the road, not to mention the number of lanes. Furthermore, I also had a lot of trouble seeing if the car was going straight forward or at a diagonal. I really did not know how to find it out. At some point I took a few classes with an older and less ambitious instructor who taught me how to use simple cues like seeing if the border of the road "goes into" a certain place in the interior of the car, or, if there is marking, seeing if the marking in the left mirror is parallel to the marking in the right mirror. My main instructor later explained to me that I shouldn't use these kinds of things since I will get into an accident if I will be checking for such things instead of looking at the road. However, after just a little bit of using these cues my mind developed some compensations, and I became much better at feeling if I was going straight or not, even if I was looking straight ahead, as before. Well, at least these compensations worked for the two particular cars. I guess, the older teacher had a point. If a beginning driver cannot see if a car is going straight or not and cannot stay parallel to the road, it is better to use any cues that will make it work so other skills can build up. I am pretty sure that with slow and careful practice I could have built up compensations like the motion parallax that would be sufficient for non-emergency situations.
Paying attention was also difficult. I tried really hard, and I think, my concentration really improved, yet there were too many things in the visual field to scan for. I had no natural way to notice traffic lights. Now I know that you could scan for things of a given color, and I had myself learned it before gaining stereopsis, but you have to be exposed to this idea. Most people just learn this skill naturally through the experience of binocular vision, and then they can scan for a given color even with one eye, for mushrooms or for traffic lights.
Noticing signs was also different. Traffic signs stand out with stereovision because the are flat, and located in the middle of the air or on vertical supports, so you see that those kinds of objects are likely to be traffic lights. I think I eventually learned to scan for the look of the most common signs, which kind of improved the situation, but I was still looking for signs in many places, yet only noticing some of them. In fact, I was scanning for everything at the same time, then figuring out what to do with it, depending on whether it were a person, a sign, or a traffic light. In other words, driving was constantly trying to solve a problem. I did not care where we were going, all I was thinking about was where another danger will come from.
I remember very clearly one case when my instructor used his break pedal. I was turning left at a pretty lively crossing. I entered the crossing, started the turn and stopped in the middle, waiting for the traffic from the right to pass. Then I had to determine when I could continue forward, that is, when there were no cars from the right. I looked right. I waited for some obvious cars to pass. Then waited a little more. I did not wait too much, since sometimes I ended up waiting until the light switched, and this meant trouble. So I looked again, saw no movement, and decided to go. As I started going, the instructor, who was waiting for my reaction, pushed the break pedal.
- Do you want to commit suicide? - he asked.
I looked again to the right, and noticed a very slight, barely discernible movement of one of the cars to the left. The car was of considerable size, more like a small lorry. A second later I saw it move more, and it was not long before it crossed the crossing in front of us.
I said nothing, but thought: How was I supposed to notice that?
I could not even imagine that my instructor literally saw the movement of this car. I guess, I was too overwhelmed to ask how he picked it up. I felt I was supposed to have noticed this very slight shift of the car to interpret that it was moving. I had little confidence in my ability to pay attention, and this is what he would have advised me to do anyway.
When I tried to pass their school test, I failed it twice in a similar way. The school test comes after completing a certain number of lessons in the driving school, and it is different for the actual exam administered by the Russian analog of the Department of Transportation. Of course, the school in question has a high standard, so the school test is quite demanding. (One of the reasons is that in Russia you often have to bribe the examiner in order to pass the test, unless you drive really well, so if you don't want to pay, you should be very well prepared.) Just like the lessons, the test involves driving on lively streets of St. Petersburg, often without any marking, with several lanes, and so on.
In one case I was also turning left, and several other cars were turning left with me. The examiner had to use the break to make sure my trajectory did not cut the trajectory of another car the was also turning left, but was to the right of us. Since my teacher was also in the car, I can be certain that it was indeed the case. In fact, of course, I had no clue, which other cars were turning left, nor which lane they were going to turn into. Worst of all, I had no clue how to choose a curve along which to turn. Even when I did choose a curve, I did not know how to follow this curve. In this case I saw other cars turning with me, but first of all, I had no sense of where my car ended and other cars started. I had no sense of it even when driving past parked cars, days after day, in the same place, slowly memorizing the feel of the images of the cars that somehow meant to turn a little left or a little right, as my instructor patiently provided the feedback over and over again.
In the second case, I was doing fine until most of the test. In the end I was driving on a quiet street that, once again, had no marking. There were occasionally some parked cars on the right and on the left, if I am correct. The street was probably wide enough for 2 lanes in each direction: one for parked cars and one for actual driving. I was, however, on a part of the road without any parked cars so I couldn't use them for reference. There was another car in front of us, a little bit to the right. (I want to write "in front of me", but it felt like "in front of us".) I was figuring out if I could just accelerate and move past this car on the second lane, leaving it on the rightmost lane, as the car was subtly shifting to the left. I was coming closer to the car, perhaps because I was moving a little faster - since I started to accelerate to pass it. I tried to divide the road into two halves and was looking at the part of the road between the imaginary line that I drew and the car. I was looking there thinking if I would fit there or not, and I had the same feeling as I had long ago looking at the railroad tracks in the subway and thinking if I person would fit there. I had no idea, but I really wanted to get small so I would fit there... Now that I am recalling it, it was virtually the same feeling in both cases.
The examiner pressed the break and told me to slow down and park near the right border, which I did fine. He couldn't understand why I started to cross the center line and, in fact, what I was trying to do in the first place. I am not sure if I wanted to or was able to explain that I wanted to pass a car directly in front of me.
Of course, if driving was something really important for me, I would have gotten a license anyway. I spent several years in a small town in the United States, and the thing that prevented me from getting a license was that I did not need it, not so much anything else. On properly labeled roads, with relatively slow traffic, I would have surely done fine, particularly all of the experiences described above. I would still be unlikely to see such things, regardless of any visual cues, since I thought it was not really possible to notice the speed of a car going right towards you. I understood the idea of visual cues: I knew how to compare the marking on the road in the left and in the right mirrors to see if I was going straight, but what cues could there be for a car going straight on you? (Indeed, can an experienced driver see such things after losing one eye? Perhaps there could be cues with light and shade? In this particular case, I guess, the car's location on the road was inappropriate for a parked car, and an experienced driver would have expected it to be moving, given that the traffic light allowed it to move.)
Overall, driving can be pretty dangerous, if you have a "nontraditional" view of the geometry of the surrounding space, no perception of the size of the car or the space that it is taking, no concept of focusing on objects, and so on. No ease and no enjoyment is possible under such conditions, and things will not improve from merely "driving more". If I were to drive on my own, I would receive very little feedback. Binocular vision is a very powerful learning tool. A driver with binocular vision turns the steering wheel and sees the changes in space, senses through the optic flow, through motion parallax, what exactly happened to the car. This calibrates the responses. I would get very little feedback from turning a wheel, and some improvement only happened because I had an instructor sitting near me who was giving me a little bit of feedback - much less, of course, than the real-time sensation of the car moving along some specific curve.
From statistics it should be clear that there should be lots of drivers out there who had never had any experience of binocular vision. There are also pedestrians who will decide to cross the road on red light, look at your car, and continue crossing, without the slightest idea about the speed of your car. They just noticed that your car looked far enough, and in the past they had always crossed fine when the car was that far...
I actually learned to drive, more or less. My instructor, with whom I had most of my classes back in Russia, was a young and enthusiastic man. He was a very good driver himself, and had training in extreme driving, which I could observe on one occasion when he was explaining something to me. His philosophy is that one should not teach people to drive in safe conditions and then leave them alone driving in a megapolis. As far as I feel from his teaching style, he correctly assumed that people learning to driver very slowly under very safe conditions will develop habits and responses, that is, a driving style, that would be totally inappropriate, and plainly dangerous, in a real-time situation. Therefore, he did his best to allow you to experience driving in a real environment, while he was making sure that both of you will survive the experience.
Most roads in Russia lack any marking. In this case, the rules say, drivers have to determine the number of lanes in each direction by themselves. Well, I had a lot of difficulty even determining the middle of the road, not to mention the number of lanes. Furthermore, I also had a lot of trouble seeing if the car was going straight forward or at a diagonal. I really did not know how to find it out. At some point I took a few classes with an older and less ambitious instructor who taught me how to use simple cues like seeing if the border of the road "goes into" a certain place in the interior of the car, or, if there is marking, seeing if the marking in the left mirror is parallel to the marking in the right mirror. My main instructor later explained to me that I shouldn't use these kinds of things since I will get into an accident if I will be checking for such things instead of looking at the road. However, after just a little bit of using these cues my mind developed some compensations, and I became much better at feeling if I was going straight or not, even if I was looking straight ahead, as before. Well, at least these compensations worked for the two particular cars. I guess, the older teacher had a point. If a beginning driver cannot see if a car is going straight or not and cannot stay parallel to the road, it is better to use any cues that will make it work so other skills can build up. I am pretty sure that with slow and careful practice I could have built up compensations like the motion parallax that would be sufficient for non-emergency situations.
Paying attention was also difficult. I tried really hard, and I think, my concentration really improved, yet there were too many things in the visual field to scan for. I had no natural way to notice traffic lights. Now I know that you could scan for things of a given color, and I had myself learned it before gaining stereopsis, but you have to be exposed to this idea. Most people just learn this skill naturally through the experience of binocular vision, and then they can scan for a given color even with one eye, for mushrooms or for traffic lights.
Noticing signs was also different. Traffic signs stand out with stereovision because the are flat, and located in the middle of the air or on vertical supports, so you see that those kinds of objects are likely to be traffic lights. I think I eventually learned to scan for the look of the most common signs, which kind of improved the situation, but I was still looking for signs in many places, yet only noticing some of them. In fact, I was scanning for everything at the same time, then figuring out what to do with it, depending on whether it were a person, a sign, or a traffic light. In other words, driving was constantly trying to solve a problem. I did not care where we were going, all I was thinking about was where another danger will come from.
I remember very clearly one case when my instructor used his break pedal. I was turning left at a pretty lively crossing. I entered the crossing, started the turn and stopped in the middle, waiting for the traffic from the right to pass. Then I had to determine when I could continue forward, that is, when there were no cars from the right. I looked right. I waited for some obvious cars to pass. Then waited a little more. I did not wait too much, since sometimes I ended up waiting until the light switched, and this meant trouble. So I looked again, saw no movement, and decided to go. As I started going, the instructor, who was waiting for my reaction, pushed the break pedal.
- Do you want to commit suicide? - he asked.
I looked again to the right, and noticed a very slight, barely discernible movement of one of the cars to the left. The car was of considerable size, more like a small lorry. A second later I saw it move more, and it was not long before it crossed the crossing in front of us.
I said nothing, but thought: How was I supposed to notice that?
I could not even imagine that my instructor literally saw the movement of this car. I guess, I was too overwhelmed to ask how he picked it up. I felt I was supposed to have noticed this very slight shift of the car to interpret that it was moving. I had little confidence in my ability to pay attention, and this is what he would have advised me to do anyway.
When I tried to pass their school test, I failed it twice in a similar way. The school test comes after completing a certain number of lessons in the driving school, and it is different for the actual exam administered by the Russian analog of the Department of Transportation. Of course, the school in question has a high standard, so the school test is quite demanding. (One of the reasons is that in Russia you often have to bribe the examiner in order to pass the test, unless you drive really well, so if you don't want to pay, you should be very well prepared.) Just like the lessons, the test involves driving on lively streets of St. Petersburg, often without any marking, with several lanes, and so on.
In one case I was also turning left, and several other cars were turning left with me. The examiner had to use the break to make sure my trajectory did not cut the trajectory of another car the was also turning left, but was to the right of us. Since my teacher was also in the car, I can be certain that it was indeed the case. In fact, of course, I had no clue, which other cars were turning left, nor which lane they were going to turn into. Worst of all, I had no clue how to choose a curve along which to turn. Even when I did choose a curve, I did not know how to follow this curve. In this case I saw other cars turning with me, but first of all, I had no sense of where my car ended and other cars started. I had no sense of it even when driving past parked cars, days after day, in the same place, slowly memorizing the feel of the images of the cars that somehow meant to turn a little left or a little right, as my instructor patiently provided the feedback over and over again.
In the second case, I was doing fine until most of the test. In the end I was driving on a quiet street that, once again, had no marking. There were occasionally some parked cars on the right and on the left, if I am correct. The street was probably wide enough for 2 lanes in each direction: one for parked cars and one for actual driving. I was, however, on a part of the road without any parked cars so I couldn't use them for reference. There was another car in front of us, a little bit to the right. (I want to write "in front of me", but it felt like "in front of us".) I was figuring out if I could just accelerate and move past this car on the second lane, leaving it on the rightmost lane, as the car was subtly shifting to the left. I was coming closer to the car, perhaps because I was moving a little faster - since I started to accelerate to pass it. I tried to divide the road into two halves and was looking at the part of the road between the imaginary line that I drew and the car. I was looking there thinking if I would fit there or not, and I had the same feeling as I had long ago looking at the railroad tracks in the subway and thinking if I person would fit there. I had no idea, but I really wanted to get small so I would fit there... Now that I am recalling it, it was virtually the same feeling in both cases.
The examiner pressed the break and told me to slow down and park near the right border, which I did fine. He couldn't understand why I started to cross the center line and, in fact, what I was trying to do in the first place. I am not sure if I wanted to or was able to explain that I wanted to pass a car directly in front of me.
Of course, if driving was something really important for me, I would have gotten a license anyway. I spent several years in a small town in the United States, and the thing that prevented me from getting a license was that I did not need it, not so much anything else. On properly labeled roads, with relatively slow traffic, I would have surely done fine, particularly all of the experiences described above. I would still be unlikely to see such things, regardless of any visual cues, since I thought it was not really possible to notice the speed of a car going right towards you. I understood the idea of visual cues: I knew how to compare the marking on the road in the left and in the right mirrors to see if I was going straight, but what cues could there be for a car going straight on you? (Indeed, can an experienced driver see such things after losing one eye? Perhaps there could be cues with light and shade? In this particular case, I guess, the car's location on the road was inappropriate for a parked car, and an experienced driver would have expected it to be moving, given that the traffic light allowed it to move.)
Overall, driving can be pretty dangerous, if you have a "nontraditional" view of the geometry of the surrounding space, no perception of the size of the car or the space that it is taking, no concept of focusing on objects, and so on. No ease and no enjoyment is possible under such conditions, and things will not improve from merely "driving more". If I were to drive on my own, I would receive very little feedback. Binocular vision is a very powerful learning tool. A driver with binocular vision turns the steering wheel and sees the changes in space, senses through the optic flow, through motion parallax, what exactly happened to the car. This calibrates the responses. I would get very little feedback from turning a wheel, and some improvement only happened because I had an instructor sitting near me who was giving me a little bit of feedback - much less, of course, than the real-time sensation of the car moving along some specific curve.
From statistics it should be clear that there should be lots of drivers out there who had never had any experience of binocular vision. There are also pedestrians who will decide to cross the road on red light, look at your car, and continue crossing, without the slightest idea about the speed of your car. They just noticed that your car looked far enough, and in the past they had always crossed fine when the car was that far...
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