"SLOW down!" Do your passengers often say this to you? If yes, chances are you are not the best of drivers. It means you are too fast for the prevailing road conditions. It means you are being aggressive, ignoring safety norms. This is not what good driving is all about.

As a good driver, you must inspire confidence in your passengers and not make them nervous.

You often see drivers racing towards a red light and then slamming the brakes. A good driver, upon seeing a red light ahead, will take his or her foot off the accelerator and will gradually come to a halt. Learn to gauge the rolling distance and stopping distance of your car. To race towards a red light, or any potential traffic hazards does not make good motoring sense. This unnecessary building up of speed consumes more fuel. Then you further waste energy by braking. This is one of the best formulae to get lousy fuel consumption.

Nowadays you have a number of aids to safe driving. One of them is rear brake lights. The car ahead will tell you when to slow down. If you see red lights ahead, take your foot off the accelerator and be ready to press the brakes. This is not the time to overtake.

Smoothly coming to a stop is easy on the car, the passengers and the fuel bills. Accelerating smoothly also means a better fuel average, and it’s also easy on the car and passengers. Cars these days are passenger-friendly. They are air-conditioned, have comfortable seats and offer a smooth drive. A bad driver can negate all that. Erratic driving can throw the passengers around and inevitably you may hear those words: "Slow down!"

Another extremely poor driving habit is crawling at a red light. At a traffic light make sure you stop at the stop line, which is boldly painted on the tarmac. It is an offence to stop on a zebra crossing. Yet this is what most drivers do. Bad driving! Then, in anticipation of the red light turning green, the bad driver begins to crawl forward, a millimetre at a time. This is a foolproof way of wearing out your clutch plate and get a low fuel average.

With traffic conditions being what they are these days, it is recommended you switch off your engine at traffic lights or any time when the halt exceeds a couple of minutes. Certainly, this will save fuel, and if you are a crawler, it will save your clutch plate.

It is important to be able to ‘read’ the road. Conditions on a road may change at different times of the day. Accordingly your driving habits will have to vary.

The underlying principle, however at all times, remains the same — driving in a manner that is safe for you and all other road users.

Roads are getting more crowded by the day. Cars don’t make traffic jams — bad drivers do. If you are one of the contributors to traffic jams and unsafe roads, now is the time to do something: don’t overtake from the left, no heavy braking, no formulae one type of stunt at red lights, no crawling, no stopping on zebra crossings.

All this means good driving, which is safe driving, fun driving.

Happy motoring!