Red flag - driving licence - VED - speed limits - it's all new !!

Passed my test in 1977 at 17yrs 5months.

Obviously the roads are far busier but the change is gradual. Some roads are now far better. Leeds to Scarborough no longer involves going through Tadcaster, York and then Malton; each a bottleneck.

The one thing I notice is Sunday traffic in provincial towns. When we moved to Northampton in 1990 you could nip through town on a Sunday in minutes - likle a ghost town. Nowadays, unless you're out on dot of ten it's as bad as Saturdays.

Agree about cyclists too. In Central London usage has doubled at least since the turn of the century.

Yay, we have critical mass!!!

Drivers have to take notice . It's brilliant.

Cars are much better, the tin worm is not the menace it was. 'Traffic calming' now is a farce, speed cameras are everywhere, when I started seat belts were just coming in. electronic ignition, catalysts, discs all round, thats all come in with improvements in reliability. fuel was and is expensive in real terms.

Exhausts are much less smelly - it's unusual to notice anything other than a diesel in need of a service. In the old days every petrol engine left an aroma behind. Mostly thanks to ECU-controlled injection systems and cat-converters.

But much of the improvement in fuel efficiency has been cancelled out by adding about 50% to a vehicle's weight with safety devices and other nice-to-haves like air-con. Though the extra bulk of those is only partly responsible for the 21st-century obesity epidemic in cars.

Edited by Andrew-T on 20/02/2013 at 20:34

I passed my test in January 1966 - longer ago than most if not all of you - and I was reading this thread agreeing with most of it.....but then Olirag's post made me think - although lots of things have changed, some for the better, some for the worse - actually some things haven't.

"On a cold morning, fiddling with the manual choke knob is something I don't miss. How lucky we are now to have reliable, electronically controlled, cold start mechanisms.

Turning the key and being rewarded with an almost instant start alongside a very regular and consistent idle is something we take for granted these days."

Olirag, was it a Ford, Vauxhall or Hillman you suffered from? I passed my test in my mum's newish Morris 1100 - first time every time and the manual choke worked perfectly. It was the same with my first car in 1969 - a 14-year-old Austin A50. Wind forward, and the same goes, as one would expect, from my newish Skoda and 12-year-old BMW Z3.

A few days ago I had time to drive in the country lanes just north of the A31 between Farnham and Alton. I was brought up in that area and it was definitely 'memory lane' - not least because, just the same as 40+ years ago, I drove for about 10 miles and hardly saw another car. Sure, there's much more traffic now, but they still stick to the main roads.

And I still enjoy driving. That hasn't changed either.

Biggest change for me was the installation of the M25 multilane car park. They've been adding additional parking spaces to it ever since.

Also speed cameras. I used to commute around the North Circular Road every morning and that was nose-to-tail 60+ mph all the way at the time(!) I knew quite a few people who refeused to go near the thing out of abject terror.

I started driving for a living in 1971 and had to often go to, around, and through London to reach my customers, approaching from the north and very often using the north circular.

Those were the days when in the 1300 escort provided by one's employer one just drove flat-out everywhere and nobody bothered you if you looked roughly as if you knew what you were doing.

I did get stopped by the the fuzz and boll**ked a couple of times on the NC - once for sneaking into a right turn only lane at TL's when I was going ahead (just trying to make progress officer, 'cos I's in a hurry to get to my customer - Oh ok but don't let me see you doing that again!) and amazingly one time when I was dawdling about not quite knowing where I was going.( you can't drive that that around here lad - get a b***** move on or I'll nick you for obstruction if I catch you pi**ing about like that again, you'll get in someone's way and cause an accident)

Yes - those were the days when you got a bo**ocking for not getting a move on!

The inability to make fast progress on single carriageway A roads. In 1967 it was rare to follow a 40mph HGV for any distance before being able to overtake it.

The plethora of fast cars with stupidly large bodies and engines. Virtually no European cars, not even Jaguar or Rolls-Bentleys, had V8s in 1967.