After a day of training with advanced driving specialist John Gregory, I’ve found myself thinking a little more about the imaginary bubble that surrounds my vehicle and how managing that space can give us more time, more options and ultimately make us safer drivers.
Advanced driving isn’t just about getting a car smoothly down the road. It’s predominantly about safety: yours, your passengers’, and everyone else we happen to be sharing the road with.
Better observation and planning help us spot risk earlier. But there’s another idea I really like because it changes the way you start looking at space around the car.
What is the Zone of Relative Safety?
Imagine your car has an invisible bubble around it. Your job, wherever possible, is to keep other road users and potential hazards outside that bubble.
The clever bit is that the bubble isn’t a fixed size.
At low speeds in heavy traffic, it might be relatively small. As speeds increase, or the potential consequences become greater, we want more space around us.
Creating space around potential hazards
Take a car waiting at a side road.
You’ve seen it. But rather than simply thinking “they should wait for me”, consider what happens if they don’t.
Can you see the driver? Have they seen you? Are the wheels moving? And, if it’s safe to do so, could a small change of position give you both a better view and create a little more space between you?
They’ll probably stay exactly where they are.
But if they don’t, that extra bit of space might turn a collision into nothing more than a sharp intake of breath.
Parked cars are another good example.
Rather than squeezing past because the car physically fits, imagine one of those doors suddenly opening. Look underneath vehicles for feet. Look through windows where you can. Look for brake lights going off, movement inside cars, pedestrians appearing between them.
Then ask yourself: if that door opened now, have I left myself enough room?
I’ve started to use a slightly odd mental picture: imagine the cyclist lying sideways on the road.
Not particularly cheerful, I know. But it gives you a useful idea of the space they may need if they wobble, hit a pothole or fall. If I can’t give them that space safely, I’d rather wait until I can. ‘Plan to pass, or plan to follow’.
More space, more time, more options
And that’s really the point.
The Zone of Relative Safety isn’t about driving around trying to maintain some perfect imaginary circle. It’s about continually managing the space around you.
Sometimes you create space by changing position. Sometimes by changing speed. Sometimes by simply waiting.
And sometimes somebody else will move into the lovely bit of space you’ve just created; because, well…traffic.
So you create it again.
Good driving isn’t just about avoiding the hazard you can see.
It’s about leaving yourself somewhere to go when somebody does the thing you didn’t expect.
For me, that’s what the Zone of Relative Safety is really about.
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