“You can’t wear those when pay for homework you’re driving,” my father said, pointing to the high-heeled shoes I was wearing at the tender age of sixteen when I was getting one of my first driving lessons. “There’s no way that you can operate the pedals properly in those.” So I ended up taking that lesson driving barefoot.
I have to confess that I like driving barefoot. People talk about enjoying the feeling of the steering wheel and the more hands-on method of driving provided by manual gearboxes or paddle-flapper semiautomatic gear shifting. But not much has been mentioned about the sensory pleasure and subtlety of what you do with your feet. If anything, the trend seems to be to use your feet as little as possible, given the trend towards auto-braking on top of automatic transmissions and cruise control. A naked foot applies brake and accelerator (OK, I drive an automatic) with minute shades of control. A little pressure here, a slight bit of easing off here, a brief flicker of the brake there. Simply shoving one’s hoof down for maximum acceleration followed by jamming on the brakes seems, well, crude. Like scribbling with a vivid marker, whereas driving barefoot is more like delicate pencil sketching.
Cars tend to like that sort of driving, too, as it doesn’t create as much wear and tear. So does your wallet, for the same reason.
However, the problem with driving barefoot comes at the end of the journey, as where you’re parked is less likely to be pleasant to walk on without something between you and the elements. Quite often in the warmer months, that something is a pair of thong sandals (aka flip-flops or jandals or whatever else you want to call them – you know the things I mean!). All the same, I don’t drive in them.
Contrary to popular myth, it is legal to drive barefoot (how could it not be?) and it is also legal to drive in thongs, except, apparently, in Victoria. However, it isn’t safe to drive in thongs, even though a lot of people do it, especially in our warm climate. There have been road safety studies in various parts of the world, and it seems that thongs might slip off and interfere with the operation of the brake and the accelerator because they can jam underneath the pedals. Describing and visualising how this happens can be tricky – the best bet would be to go out to your car in a pair of thongs and, with the engine off, fidget your feet around a lot and see what happens.
It’s also a dumb idea to kick your thongs off and leave them floating around by your feet, as they can still get stuck and/or in the way. Chuck them into the passenger seat or stick them in the glove box (who keeps driving gloves in the glove box these days, anyway?).
You do get some stories about people not braking properly when driving barefoot because a sharp stone is sitting on the brake pedal and they jerk their foot back automatically. But how often does this sort of thing happen really? I usually go through a little ritual of sliding my feet up and down the brake pedal before I start the ignition (partly because I’m readjusting the seat after my husband’s been driving), which gets rid of any stones.
And as for high heels… well, obviously, not many of you guys wear them. They do put your feet at an awkward angle for applying the pedal (into the passenger seat with them and drive barefoot again). They also have next to no grip and slide off pedals at the wrong moment into the bargain. However, this wasn’t the case for one car I’ve driven. This was a late 80s Alfa Romeo of my grandmother’s, and the accelerator pedal was at an awkward angle that meant that you had to either raise your heel from the floor to operate it or floor the thing. How Italian is that? Either high heels or furious driving. The more recent Alfas have, thankfully, corrected this fault. However, in my grandmother’s car, I struggled along for most of the trip getting a very sore ankle and calf as I drove along with one heel in the air. Then the sneakers came off and I ended up using my bare toes to operate the accelerator. It still hurt and I was glad when that trip was over, but it was a lot better than the high heels.