Learning To Drive: Nervous Wreck 3939However, driving experience in rural areas differs significantly from driving experience in city areas. It is important to be familiar with both types of environments (and others you may encounter), but neither is...
Loads of practice. That's really the only way to become more confident driving.
Two suggestions I would make:
1) See if there is a driving school in your area (You indicate that you're 16. Does your local high school offer Driver's Ed?). That way you should beable to get practice driving both on a closed course (to get accustomed to handling the vehicle with out the distractions of traffic) and practice on the road with a trained professional who won't freak out at every little thing. Just MNSHO, but I think that driver training should be mandatory for everyone before they get a full license.
2) See if you can find some little used roads somewhere in your area where you can drive around and get some experience with just handling the vehicle and not worry too much about traffic. FWIW, when I got my permit, my Dad took me to an abandoned area that was once a mall to practice driving (little to no traffic and even some debris to practice avoiding obsticles) before taking me onto the streets. I also did #1 through a program that the local school system offered after school at the time. We did the closed course thing and also low speed city driving and higher speed driving in a rural area. About the only thing we didn't actually do was interstate driving (we did do that on simulators, though).
Good luck...
