Road test in Arden hills; help!

[connomar]

Arden Hills Driving Test

Arden Hills seems to get a lot of flack from people who accuse them of being rude, unhelpful etc. I would just like to say I saw none of that. They were courteous and very pleasant.

Arriving

I hate not knowing exactly what is going to happen, and strangely nobody had written about that, perhaps thinking it was self explanatory.

Well, here are the stages:

On arrival at the test center, drive to the traffic lights and turn right. Remember that this is a live test center, and you need to obey the rules of the road, even though it is very quiet. You will pass over an uncontrolled junction on the way in, so don't assume that traffic will yield to you. Safety first. Further to this, people coming into the center are not necessarily coming for a road test, and may ignore the traffic lights and the uncontrolled junctions.

Drive from the light to the end of the road, and turn right again. You should see signs telling you to turn right again, onto the 4 lane one way street, and a little way up, to turn right into the check in area. They will ask for all the documents required (via intercom, and slide out a tray in which to place them. They ask you to cycle through lights and indicators. If they don't work correctly, you're not taking the test. The documents are returned, paper clipped together, with a large hand written number indicating your queue position, which you are told to place on the dashboard so the examiner can see it from outside. They then give you a bay number to park in, and posts with signs make that easy to negotiate.

You will probably end up parked behind someone, so just sit quietly until it is your turn, and move the car forward when the person in front leaves.

The examiner will scan the numbers on the car dashboards to find their next customer. They will get in and greet you in what I think is a friendly manner. They then look at your paperwork and start completing a form that they ask you to sign. That over with, you will be asked to show them that you know where the seat adjustment levers are located, Headlights and Brights, Hazard Warning Lights, Horn, Wipers and finally the Defrost setting on the ventilation system.

Now my examiner put on the seat belt, but I am over 60, and this may have some bearing on whether examiners check that you are alert enough to notice they are not belted up before the vehicle is moving.

IMPORTANT: My examiner clearly stated that whilst most of the roads on the course only have a centerline, or perhaps even no lines, all roads are to treated as if there are 4 lanes.

Not all examiners have you follow the same route, so the route I took may not be the route you take.

The first instruction: Start the car and turn right. Treat this as an exit from one road into another, I.e. Use the Indicators and of course exaggerate all observation of mirrors etc. Now comes the first tricky bit. If you were in a low numbered bay, you have virtually no road to get in the correct position for a left turn. So you have turned right into the closest lane, and only then are you told to turn left. Now you have to indicate, look over your shoulder and get in the imaginary lane closest to the single center line, all within 2 – 3 car lengths.

Also important is that all the Tee Junctions are really Cross Roads and must be treated as such. Therefore, you need to indicate at each one.

Whilst I don't remember the exact track around the course, I do remember being asked to turn left, and with the pretend 4 lanes (2 each way) turning from next to the center line, to next to the center line. It can be a little confusing, that when you turn into a road, there may be coned areas where parallel parking takes place. When I saw this, I moved to the left, thus treating the right lane as if it were a shoulder or designated parking area. No comment was made about this so I assume it was okay. I actually had to wait whilst the student in front of me made a terrible hash of the parallel park.

It occurred to me at this point that my car has reverse parking sensors. I asked the examiner if I needed to turn them off, and she said NO. For all the rear visibility our car has, I might as well be driving a van, so it was nice to know they were there, but the parking went well. In my Country of birth, the parking bays are only required to be 16 feet long, rather than the test center's 25 feet.

I think we did the reversing into a garage exercise next. Indicating right, I drove past the flags, then having checked over my shoulder that nothing was coming, turned across the road – but not further than the center line, and reversed largely on mirrors. I was told to stop when the front of the car was level with the flags.

Downhill parking actually did have a very slight hill. Now I don't know if the order of things matters here, but I did Emergency Brake on, whilst holding down the brake pedal, then put the car into park, and finally turned the wheels, in my case to the right as we were parking DOWNHILL. When told to go again, I put my foot on the brake first, then took the car out of park and into drive, then lastly the emergency brake. This maybe a personal preference, but for the sake of the mechanics of the car, leaving the weight of the car on the park teeth of the gearbox is not good practice. Better that the emergency brake is taking the strain, and the gearbox park is just insurance. Of course it is important to turn the wheels away from the curb before pulling away.





I hope I have answered some of the questions that I had about the test before I started it. I hope I am wrong, but I do wonder if the experience of young drivers is slightly different to those of we more senior customers. Now I'm thinking about a defensive driving course to lower my insurance premium.

[Ghengis]

when I took my test at Arden Hills, I had my mom hide behind a tree right near the start and toss a dead opossum into the open passenger window onto the instructor. It's likely he didn't know what an opossum was by the way he was screaming...I told him it looked to be a giant rat, he was so unnerved he passed me on the spot and got out of the car and ran screaming into the exam station.