You often see stickers on the back of vans, especially white vans, asking “how’s my driving”.

Often there is a misconception that white van men are the worst drivers on the road, well those that have never seen “school run mum” or “school run dad” in action, would change their mind immediately. The rules of the road are, if you are reversing you stop,  wait until the other vehicles have passed, then continue reversing.  If you are on the school run, that rule is immediately thrown out of the window.

It’s seems that when on the school run, reversing vehicles have priorities, even if they are reversing into oncoming traffic.

Parking and road markings? you can forget them in an instant. Those yellow boxes, they don’t mean no parking to a parent on the school run, they mean emergency parking, close to the school as like the 50 or so other parents you have a child to drop off.

Let’s talk white lines…

In the UK we drive with the white line to the right of the steering wheel, we should not cross that white line. Now if a car is illegally parked and you have to pull around it, you will cross the white line into the oncoming traffic. What you should do is wait until you can go around, what happens is parents pulling around these vehicles as they are in their way *and* accelerating into the oncoming traffic, almost playing chicken, and then swerving back onto their side of the road.

How I wish they had some “how’s my driving?” stickers for me to call them.

Which leads to a question that needs to be answered – How am I supposed to call about how their driving is, whilst driving myself? The honest answer is I can’t drive and use the phone.  Doesn’t stop the parents on the school run though. A fellow courier company was just on the phone telling me they have had a spate of such calls, from parents in their vehicles complaining about their driver blocking a parking spot near the local school, they checked their tracking and they didn’t have a vehicle in the area at the time. They were quite puzzled and on the third such call, they asked where they had got the number from. From the van in the high street came the reply, it looked just like the one blocking the road at the school…

Not all school run mums/dads are the same, and not all white van men are the same.

Have a good look, see beyond the van.

Sarah