While overtaking, should you be more alert and adjust how you drive to match shifting road conditions and scenarios, ensuring you can react swiftly?

In the video, you are driving on a two-way road through a forest behind a light-coloured car. When overtaking, you should be more alert and adjust your behaviour to the changing conditions and situations on the road so that you can react quickly enough. The answer is: yes.

The Road Traffic Act states that when overtaking, the driver of a vehicle is obliged to exercise particular caution, and in particular to keep a safe distance from the vehicle or road user being overtaken. The Act defines particular caution exactly as the question puts it: it is caution that consists in increasing attention and adjusting the road user's behaviour to the conditions and situations changing on the road, to a degree that allows a sufficiently quick reaction. Overtaking is one of the riskiest manoeuvres, because for a few seconds you drive in the lane for the opposite direction and everything can change: someone may come round the bend from the opposite direction, the vehicle being overtaken may speed up or turn, a cyclist may come out of a forest track. That is why during the manoeuvre you look far ahead, keep spare power and space so that you can pull back in or abandon the overtaking, and you do not start it when anything raises doubts.

Legal basis: Art. 24 para. 2 and Art. 2 point 22 of the Road Traffic Act (Prawo o ruchu drogowym)