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Online driving tutorial - Coming onto the Portway by Sea Mills station

A-Class Driving School Tutorials | Coming onto the Portway by Sea Mills station

The Portway is the major fast road in the Avonmouth test area. Emerging onto the Portway can occur at several junctions. Most, thankfully, are traffic light controlled. This page is here to take you through how to do it safely by Sea Mills train station.

Emerging onto any dual carriageway is potentially high risk. The vast majority of your observational emerging experience is judging the speed of vehicles travelling 20 to 30 mph. With a high speed dual carriageway, other road users could be doing twice that. So, making sure you can see as far down the road as possible is important. Otherwise you could find yourself pulling out in front of someone and slowing them down, resulting in a fail.

Emerging at Sea Mills

The issue with emerging onto the Portway at Sea Mills, is that the give way lines are in an awful position. There is no way of being able to check clearly for a speeding vehicles when stopped here.

The reason for the lines being so far back is for the bus stop located on your left. The bendy buses use the Portway and need additional space and time to get into the bus stop and out of the way of traffic. Hence why the give way markings are set so far back.

What you'll need to do is come to the end of the road. Stop at the line. Check for the bus, then edge forward until you're in a position to see clearly all the way down as far as possible. During a lesson, I once witnessed a Porsche travelling at what must have been around 150 mph on this road. It's essential to come forward enough to observe effectively for this eventuality.

You can see in the photos below, the give way lines are about a car length from actually being on the actual part of the road where vehicles travel. This is close to where you need to be to be able to see properly.

You may even be able to see where the old give way lines are. Stop just before these. Failing that, where the dark and light coloured tarmac meets is another easy visual reference to use.