Agree with you Tony. That was why they started to teach defensive driving. Basically your driving for everybody else, you have to be so alert now that truthfully you shouldn't even be conversing with your passengers and if you are and not having to ask them to repeat every now and again then your consentration has been broken long enough for you to have consequences. This was taught to me by a advanced driving examiner. Must admit it's pretty well impossible to do especially when my wife says look at this and that when I'm driving, most times I just say sorry missed that. Anyone IMO who drives and converses plus looks at their passenger for more than a milli second needs to think hard about wether they should carry on driving. The worst signal sent out to young drivers are the films where they look at the passenger and talk for seconds, most if not all scenes are filmed with the vehicle on a trailer, just hope the youngsters realise.
Funny how nearly every time I go out I experience at least one more terrible manoeuvre by an idiot which tells me even though I think Ive seen it all that's totally not the case. I believe you cannot drive so well you'll never have an accident cos the idiots keep coming up with yet something totally new, all you really can do IMOO is try and concentrate 100% of the time, the faster you drive the better your concentration has to be or you'll end up meeting your maker before you really intended. I've always driven as fast as conditions will allow and had some near misses but I believe near misses have slowed me down that much that I rarely now go really fast even on the motorways I'm sticking to the limit more and more as the driving of others deteriorates to the point that it's impossible to speed safely, if it ever was.????
Just to finish off, I taught that if you leave a gap big enough someone will take it. In other words you've invited someone to take the chance, so in built up areas I close up just enough to make it very hard for someone to pull out on me, if you can't or don't want to close the gab then you must be prepared to lose it, now that's defo not rocket science is it.