The short answer
Around Düsseldorf you have the A46, A52, A57, A3 and A44 — five very different motorways in a small space. They train what nothing else can: joining via slip roads that are sometimes short, changing lanes in dense traffic, following distance at speed, and leaving in good time before an interchange.
Four of the twelve special drives belong on the motorway. In many regions that means a long drive out and then a straight road. In Düsseldorf it is the opposite: the motorway starts more or less at the edge of the city, and it is busy.
The five on the doorstep
- A46 — straight through the south, with junctions inside the city and correspondingly dense traffic
- A52 — north and towards the airport, often the calmer way in
- A57 — towards Neuss and Krefeld, with long stretches of roadworks
- A3 — the heavily used north-south axis with a high proportion of lorries
- A44 — towards Ratingen and further east
That proximity is an advantage for training and a demand at the start. Joining here for the first time means no empty carriageway to practise on — it means the real one, with an instructor beside you.
Not out on the open road, but at the junctions inside the city: the acceleration lanes there are partly short, and the right-hand lane is a solid line of traffic. Hesitate and you roll to the end of it with too little speed. That is where we prompt most often on motorway drives — and where it lands after the third time.
What the dense traffic adds
The interchanges around Düsseldorf come one after another. Sometimes only a few kilometres separate joining from leaving, and that trains exactly what an empty road never does: getting into the right lane early, reading signs before they are in view, and abandoning a lane change when the gap turns out not to fit.
What else we practise there
- Following distance at a speed that does not feel like speed
- Roadworks with narrow lanes and offset routing — available on the A57 almost all year
- Spotting a queue, hazard lights, the emergency corridor
- Slowing on the deceleration lane, not before it
- Wet roads: Düsseldorf supplies the conditions reliably
Why this is a double lesson
Motorway drives are in practice always taken as two units back to back. With a single unit half the time would go on getting there and back — how the twelve special drives divide up is set out separately.
A stretch of motorway can also come up in the test. There is no fixed route anyway — what awaits you instead is a post of its own.
What to take away
A motorway on the doorstep is more demanding than an empty rural one — and exactly for that reason the better place to learn. Anyone who can join in Düsseldorf can join anywhere; the reverse does not hold.