Where to look for developing hazards

A scanning routine for hazard perception: the specific places hazards appear, and the clues that give them away before they are obvious.

People who score badly on hazard perception are usually watching the centre of the road. Hazards develop at the edges.

The scanning routine

Move your eyes constantly between six things:

1. Pavements, both sides. Look at where people are facing, not just where they are. Someone facing the road is about to cross it.
2. Junction mouths. Every side road is a place a vehicle can appear. Check whether anything is waiting, and where the driver is looking.
3. Gaps between parked vehicles. These are the doorways pedestrians use, and they hide children entirely.
4. Wheels, not bodywork. A car's front wheels turned outwards tell you it is about to pull out before anything else does.
5. Brake lights well ahead. Not the car in front — three or four cars in front. That is your earliest warning of a queue.
6. Reflections and shadows. Shop windows show you round corners. Shadows move before their owners come into view.

Clues by road user

Pedestrians

• Facing the road rather than walking along it
• Standing at a kerb, looking at traffic
• Children near an ice cream van, school gate, park or bus stop
• Someone hurrying, or looking at a phone

Parked vehicles

• Exhaust vapour, brake lights or reversing lights
• Front wheels turned outwards
• A head silhouette in the driver's seat
• Hazard lights, or a door already ajar

Cyclists and motorcyclists

• A glance over the shoulder — they are about to move out
• Approaching a drain, pothole, parked car or painted line
• Riding close to a line of parked cars, where a door could open
• Filtering down the outside of a queue you are about to turn across

Junctions

• A waiting driver looking away from you
• A vehicle edging forward at the give-way line
• A long vehicle signalling one way and moving the other
• Anything obscuring your view of the mouth — a hedge, a van, a bus

Rural roads

• Mud on the road, meaning a tractor just ahead
• A bend you cannot see round
• Horse riders, walkers facing you, and animals near hedgerows
• Gateways and farm entrances

Practise it in a real car

The most effective hazard-perception practice is not on a screen. It is sitting in the passenger seat and saying out loud what you can see developing, before it develops. Ask whoever is driving to do the same.

Then come back and try the practice scenarios, where you get a timeline showing exactly when the scoring window opened.