Meeting situations and clearance to obstructions and other road users

 I live on a terraced street with no off road parking and it is always very obvious if you spend just a few minutes in the street watching cars pass along the street that one aspect of driving that people struggle with is how to deal with parked cars when there is on coming traffic - or "meeting situations" as we call them in the driver training industry.

For the purposes of training, a "meeting situation" is an situation in which the road space is restricted to a point where two road users travelling in different directions who want to use the road don't have sufficient space to share it safely.

It is affected, no only by the physical width of the road, but also the size and type of vehicles wanting to use the space available and the need for safety margins. For example, a cyclist approaching a meeting situation requires very little physical space, but needs a big safety margin - so they essentially need to be allowed as much space as a car coming through. Likewise, if there is a line of parked cars on your left hand side, it's possible people could open doors or walk around those cars, so a 1mtr safety space should be allowed, whereas if it's a long straight wall, then we can get a bit closer to it without fear of things like opening doors affecting us.

The rules are quite simple really:

• If your side of the road is obstructed by a parked car, then you do not have priority
• You have priority if your side of the road is clear
• Where there are obstructions on both sides, or if it's a canal bridge or something in the countryside where the road naturally narrows, then neither of you have priority
• The highway code advises you to hand priority to large vehicles coming uphill regardless of what side of the road the obstructions are on
• The highway code advises you to hand priority to those who have already commenced their journey through the meeting situation

Some of this will sound like common sense to a lot of people, but time and time again, you see people driving onto the wrong side of the road, forcing on coming traffic to stop (in order to avoid a serious head on collision) and then waving "to say thanks for letting me through". We also see people "squeezing through" very tight spaces, bringing all moving traffic down to a crawl as they do so - don't they realise that stopping and going through one at a time allows people to come through quicker, due to the presence of safety margins and therefore giving way is actually going to reduce journey times as well as danger?

In terms of the safety margins, the rules are again quite clear:

• For parked cars leave 1mtr of space
• For cyclists and pedestrians leave 2mtr of space
• For horses leave as much room as you can
• For on coming traffic, there should be at least 1.5mtr of space

To summarise...

DO NOT ENTER A MEETING SITUATION UNLESS YOU CAN SEE THAT YOUR PATH THROUGH TO THE NEXT PASSING PLACE IS SAFE AND THAT YOU CAN LEAVE THE CORRECT SAFETY MARGINS

Nick Heath Driver Training is a driving school operating in and around the area of Alsager, in South Cheshire. We offer advanced driver training and testing (through our association with Diamond Advanced Motorists), Driving Instructor Training, Driving Instructor Franchising and of course we train learner drivers too. More details can be found by visiting our website at www.nickheathdrivertraining.org.uk or by calling 0800 820 20 38