We teach driving throughout most of Pinellas County. The full length of the county from North to South is about 38 miles! That’s a lot of area to cover, so we divide the county into North and South sections. This keeps our instructors covering a smaller area, which they can be much more familiar with, and also helps us stay on-schedule.
The Pinellas Driving School North area includes everything North of Ulmerton Road, but South of Alderman Road. We don’t teach lessons East out of the county. And, of course, West would put us in the Gulf! If you live outside of our coverage area, you would need to meet us somewhere within our area. See the list of cities within our North Pinellas Area below.
North Pinellas is an area that is different from the rest of Pinellas County or surrounding counties. It presents it’s own unique challenges for a beginning driver. Much of it is a little more suburban. It’s less of the “big city grid”, having instead self-contained neighborhoods (some gated, some not) with a larger grid of 4-6 lane roads between them. We also have access to some rural roads to the North and East of Lake Tarpon. Plus everybody’s favorite US Highway 19, which includes the very different environments of “the flyover” being a controlled access highway, and the “surface street” part, which can be particularly dangerous.
We’ll always start a new driver in a parking lot or a quiet neighborhood. Big, empty parking lots can be hard to find in this area, but we have a few that we can use. We have plenty of nice neighborhoods to choose from, however!
After our student has mastered basic low-speed driving, our next step would be a faster 2-lane road. The way North Pinellas is laid out, especially the area North of Gulf-to-Bay, that can sometimes be hard to find. We’ll sometimes have to drive a student to a location like the South side of Dunedin, or West of Keene in South Clearwater to find those simple 2-lane roads.
We will progress to multiple lane roads like Belcher and Keene, or Ulmerton and East Bay only after the student is proficient with lane control, speed control, road signs and basic traffic control devices. Then we’ll get comfortable in a slightly faster environment, introduce lane changes and lots and lots of defensive driving!
Lastly, once we’re fully comfortable with multiple lane surface streets at 40-45 mph, dealing with traffic, making lane changes, traffic light turns of all types and so on… then we’ll make the transition to higher speed highway driving. We’ll make some passes up and down US-19 just to get familiar with it and adjust to the higher speeds. Then we’ll get into merges.
That’s just an overview of how we’d teach a student to drive in North Pinellas County. Every student is different, and their particular location and skill set will dictate exactly what we do and how we do it.