All driving problems arise from a single source, our standard paradigm for driving:

– Operate a few simple controls.

– Keep the car on the road.

– Occasionally notice and respond to major landmarks like stoplights.

That’s it.  That’s our concept of driving – our universally accepted standard paradigm for it.  That paradigm is the basis for our laws, our training, our licensing, our cars, our roads, our expectations, and our driving performance.

I’m not kidding.  Look around.  Those three points really do describe how people drive.  Not just a few of us, the overwhelming majority of us.

The unquestioned acceptance and use of that trivializing paradigm by law makers, law enforcement agencies, road safety groups, civil engineers, automobile manufacturers, highway safety researchers, driving teachers, driving students, and drivers themselves is the only reason our driving problems continue to defy solution.  The paradigm itself generates inattention, arrogance, clumsiness, and  blunders.  It causes delays, irritations, dangers, losses, deaths, and destruction.

Systemic change is necessary.  A new paradigm is required – one that is realistic, self-evident, useable, and true to the intrinsic logic of driving.  As that new paradigm becomes understood, accepted, and used by drivers – including everybody we trust to make and enforce our driving rules, build our roads, design our vehicles, cue our attitudes, and prescribe our skills – road travel will be wondrously transformed.  It will become prodigiously more safe, efficient, comfortable, and pleasurable.