Keep left...

Date: May 2011
Test Centre: Upton
Reason for fail: Serious fault, Positioning - Normal driving

Liz has just gone through a set of traffic lights. She was in the right hand lane because a car was indicating left in the left lane, so she used the lights to overtake this slow moving vehicle safely. Unfortunately, she stayed out in the right lane, and wasn't going particularly quickly. When a car overtook her on the left, the examiner was always going to give her a serious fault.

What should Liz have done?

She should have been looking in her left door mirror to make sure she was past the car she was overtaking, with a view to getting back to the left as early as possible. By staying out to the right, she made it difficult for herself to get safely back over, because of cars coming up on her left. It would have been better if she'd been a bit more assertive, as she would have gained the space to move over safely. Accellerating while changing lane takes you away from the danger,

Keep left!

Date of Test:  June 2011, 12.43pm
Test Centre: Upton, Merseyside
Reason for fail:  serious fault, Positioning - Normal Driving

Apart from getting things wrong at the end of a one way street, Fred also picked up a serious fault on a bit of road with more than one lane. The road had two lanes for westbound traffic, and there were some parked vehicles on the left, forcing traffic out into the outside lane. After the last of these parked cars was passed, Fred checked his mirrors and sigmalled left, and started to move to the left, but had to abort the lane change because of a lady in a BMW aggressively overtaking on his left. He could have done with breaking down the MSM stuff there into M----S----M, rather than it all happening in a vvery short space of time, but this wasn't where he got a serious fault. His driving was good enough to keep himself safe, and the examiner recognised that Fred was travelling at the speed limit, and that the BMW driver was at fault for breaking the speed limit and illegally overtaking on the left.

But a few hundred yards further on, Fred had to move out to the right hand lane again, because of a parked van, and this time he made no attempt to get back to the left after passing the obstruction. A car once again overtook him on the left, but this time he was travelling a little too slowly (the speed limit changed from 30 to 40 mph around this point) and he'd had plenty of time to get back to the left.

Well what was the proper way of doing it?

There has to be a reason for you to be in the right hand lane. If you're overtaking another vehicle (moving or parked) or some other obstruction like roadworks or something, fine. Get out there and stay out there until you know you're clear of whatever it is you're overtaking. If you want to turn right fairly soom, again, there's a good reason for you to be out to the right.

But in the absence of those reasons, keep left. It's safer. It allows other drivers to overtake you legally. It shows that you're reading the situation properly.

This is a really common fault! I had a pupil fail her test for thesame thing in the same place a couple of weeks ago, and a different pupil made the same error on a different stretch of road, but with the same mark on the test sheet: Serious fault, Position - Normal Driving and the same outcome: Failed test.