Pinellas Driving School serves all of Pinellas County, which includes Palm Harbor and surrounding communities! We’ll start by exploring your own neighborhood (if it is appropriate) to evaluate your skill level, before getting out onto some secondary two-lane roads like Palm Harbor Blvd (Alt-19), Omaha Street, or Highlands Blvd. From there, as you are ready, we’ll start exploring the traffic on Belcher, Tampa Road, Alderman, and eventually US-19! If we have time, and there is a need, we may even explore downtown Dunedin or Tarpon Springs, and even head South for some highway driving on the US-19 flyover through Clearwater.
Learning to Drive
Learning to drive an automobile in the modern age can be intimidating, especially when you live in the busy metropolitan area of Pinellas County! We’re here to help ease the transition from “nervous beginning driver” to “confident experienced driver.” At Pinellas Driving School, we believe that it all starts with the basics.
Driving School
A lot of folks who teach driving, whether they be your Uncle Ernie, dear old Grandad, your Mom, or sometimes even a professional driving school — they have the tendency to push a new driver out into the world before they are ready. “Here are the keys, that’s the steering wheel, gas is on the right, brake is on the left, let’s go drive across town!” In addition to being potentially very dangerous, it’s completely overwhelming to the student, and it’s a sort of backwards approach.
Sure, the sink-or-swim method can work… eventually (if you don’t end up with a crashed car, or a mentally traumatized student first). Unfortunately, you end up with drivers who know how to navigate city traffic (sort of), but still have no idea what their car can and can’t do. How big is the car? How quickly can it stop? How quickly can it turn to avoid something? How quickly can it NOT stop? What happens if I try to turn too sharply too fast, or try to pull a lane change too fast at 60 mph? These are things that a LOT of people learn “by accident,” and this is why your auto insurance rates for the first 5-10 years of driving are so expensive! Pinellas Driving School is here to help you avoid those pitfalls.
Learn to Drive with Confidence
The Pinellas Driving School approach is to spend the time necessary to ensure that the student is fully comfortable with the car before getting them out into traffic. We try to build confidence with skills such as negotiating turns, smooth acceleration and braking, smooth and confident quick stops, emergency stops, and looking far enough ahead to avoid most of the surprises on the road. Once a driver has mastered those things, then when they get out into traffic, they’re no longer thinking about “the car,” and they can more easily focus on “the traffic.” As a result, we find that students who have completed our driving school course become safer and more confident more quickly than just dumping them into traffic and hoping that they figure everything out while every other driver on the road is trying to kill them!