Driving Test? Need Help with Roundabouts

Using blockers to enable you to make safe progress at Roundabouts is a very important skill to practice.

If you are doing your Driving Test in Ireland, knowing how to use a Roundabout correctly is a very important skill. In this video, we explain what a blocker is & how it will help you make progress on your Driving Test.

Hi everybody and welcome to this video sean here your RSA Approved Driving Instructor with passfirsttime.ie ireland's online driving school and this is a series on roundabouts, roundabouts are one of the big reasons for driving test failure, and rather than having one big long video all about roundabouts I'm going to split it into smaller sections and in today's section we are going to take a look at what's called blockers, so what is a blocker? First of all let's let's see yourself you're coming in and you want to turn left at this roundabout you want to take the first exit on your right hand side you see a car coming from the right but that car is pausing so you're trying to figure out why that car is pausing and if you look to the top right hand corner you see there is a car coming straight ahead now the car coming straight ahead he's going to come down past the block or this car here and exit from the roundabout here he's in the outside lane he's got no signal on there's no fear of him going down here so this car is what you would call a blocker in other words he is blocking this car from moving here because this car is yielding to his right so he is watching that car and that then gives you what i would call a window of opportunity to enter the roundabout so let's look at what happens blocker stops the car from the right you move in and then everybody moves away after the blocker has passed a lot of people fail to recognize blockers as they enter roundabouts and they roll up if i play the very same scenario again and they stop unnecessarily and wait and wait until this car has passed and only then do they go into the roundabout but the examiner in this instance would penalize you for lack of progress so how can you recognize blockers is the next question the easiest way to recognize that there's a blocker in play as we would say is if this car on your right is slowing down or is coming to a stop you look across the roundabout to see why is the car coming to a stop you'd also look over here so we've already seen the car coming from the far side over here let's look at another scenario where a blocker can help us gain access to a roundabout you are approaching the roundabout turning left yet again you're glancing to the right very early one of the biggest mistakes i find is that people are glancing a little bit too late to the right to look for the oncoming traffic the other big one is speed we will look at these in future videos but far today and this video is just the blocker we're looking at so we have a car up the top here coming in going around to the right the car on your right has clearly seen this uh this car here and they are yielding to that car and that is why they are pausing so at this stage even if you feel this car is coming around it is blocking the car on your right you could enter the roundabout so if you resume at this stage and we resume the other car the other car comes off and the car on your right then rolls in so hopefully this is becoming clear it can be be tricky because sometimes people won't indicate correctly coming into roundabouts and on other occasions people use incorrect lanes so the whole spotting the blocker is is like a it's like a jigsaw puzzle the whole entering of a roundabout is like a jigsaw puzzle there are various parts to the puzzle and what you were trying to do is put the parts together comfortably so that you can enter the roundabout safely on a very big are a small very busy roundabout you could even have a car coming in and going all the way around that would act as a blocker to cars here and also of course acts as a blocker to any cars on the far side so even if in a small roundabout if you had a car approaching from the top with the right signal and you have a car on the top lane here going right across the top that acts as a blocker in case the roundabout was very small and yet again gives you an opportunity to move into the roundabout and everybody clears the roundabout safely so the ideal way to work with blockers is to to practice we're going to go live to the car now and give you the real life examples of blockers in action have a look at these now this first clip is slow down apologies for the poor quality we're glancing to the right well back from the roundabout we can see two cars coming off the roundabout on the right and we're looking to the right and looking across the road in case we do need a blocker in this case there's no car to the right but that car coming around would have acted as a blocker you can see it's going straight ahead off of the roundabout and would never have come across our path this clip approaching a small roundabout we can see traffic from the right the car coming towards us now would act as a blocker if there had been a car on the right which there wasn't so you're looking well back to see if there are cars coming from your right and also to see if there's a blocker coming your way slow down this clip again busy roundabout glancing right at this stage i can see a car coming from my right so i pause there doesn't appear to be any car after him even if there was this white ford focus coming around would act as a blocker and allow me into the roundabout safely

this clip busy roundabout pedestrian crossing cars on the right seem to be stopped and we just look we see one car coming around in front of us there is a car in front of me so i'm waiting this car is going straight ahead look you could see the wheels are dead straight that's the blocker here's the second blocker cars going the wheels are dead straight car in front of me has moved the jeep is acted as a blocker for me to go around as well so in i go and around the roundabout and this all happens in seconds so you have to be very careful small busy roundabout lots of traffic glancing right car on my right seems to be turning left got the signal on this car coming towards me wheels are straight car driver is looking straight ahead so i'm quite confident that car is going straight on as it does and allows me a nice safe gap into the very busy roundabout now this takes a lot of practice so keep practicing your roundabouts keep looking for the blockers finally this roundabout cars on my right appear to be stopped there's a red car blocking there's a wine jeep blocking them there and allowing me in is this last car the estate which blocks the two cars on the right and again gives me a safe opportunity to go into the roundabout so practice makes perfect don't expect to get these right and you really have to be very careful and be very sure that the car you think is a blocker is actually a blocker and it is safe to go into the roundabout but with plenty of practice and experience you will develop these skills which are very important as part of your driving test preparation all the best to everybody if they do have a test this week check out our website passforcetime.ie for more details and our free driving test secrets mini course on the website if you've got value out of this video as always please like and subscribe and a big welcome to all our new subscribers in the last seven to ten days till the next video safe motoring

Categories: Driving Test