Driving Schools - Learning to drive in Manhattan

[William]

I will - I'm reserving my comments until after I'm done.

I will say this - my road test is scheduled for early November which I think is way too early given the number of lessons (10 hours worth, of which an hour and a half are set aside for the road-test).

[William]

I passed my road test on the first try

The reason I've been holding back on documenting my journey is that for a while I didn't like my instructor and felt it best to wait until I was done before I commented publicly.

I live in the Upper West Side yet by our third class he asked if we could meet in the Lower East Side "because it offered more interesting driving" (paraphrasing). We had been talking and I was under the impression that he had another job somewhere in the LES and that he hung out there a lot so I wondered if it was just because it was more convenient for him.

He also nitpicked over ever little thing. Right up front he told me not to lean on the armrest and to keep my left foot extended. I didn't see what the big deal was. I had both hands on the wheel and didn't use my left foot for driving.

Further, he was a stickler for time. At our first lesson, there was some miscommunication when we wold meet and so I was ten minutes late. 50 minutes later my lesson was over. The clock started ticking when the lessons were scheduled to start, not when I showed up. That irked me.

At other times when I would make a right hand turn and there was absolutely no way a car could pass on the right side, he would say, "You didn't check your blind-spot!"

"Signal, Mirror, Blind-spot" was his constant mantra.

I had signed up for ten lessons but eight lessons in I had barely done any parallel parking and I didn't feel I cold pass the road-test. My instructor agreed, so I signed up for an additional five lessons.

By then though, I came to realize that all of his nitpicking was making me a better driver. Checking my blind-spot when a there was no way a car could squeeze by? Well, a bicycle could and that's exactly what happened on occasion when we drove around the Lower East Side.

And he was right! The Lower East Side was a better neighborhood to learn. I love the Upper West Side, but for the most-part it's filled with wide avenues with very few stop signs or places to make three-point turns, let alone the traffic, bikes, cars, pedestrians you find downtown.

The Lower East Side was definitely - Definitely a better place to learn to drive! I thanked him for his recommendation.

And as for being a nitpicker about time? There were many lesson where we drove beyond our alotted hour. I had paid for an hour and a half of his time for the road-test, yet rather than joining the queue to take the test, we practiced and practiced for an hour, taking over three hours, from the time we got togther until we were back in Manhattan.

In the end, I thanked him for not only teaching me how to pass the road test, but also for teaching me to be a better, safer driver.

[judithkoo]

Hi William,
If you are the person that took driving lessons with Professional Driving School, please tell me the name the name of your instructor. I want someone to nag me to do well.
Thanks Judith.

[William]

The instructor's name was Ed

[Michael Klein]

A while ago Susan Vega wrote about how she learned how to drive in New York.