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| A Ford Ka, very popular, very small. This is obviously the teenage sporty model, responsible for the draconian UK Driving Test, no doubt. Look at that wicked grille! (Wiki commons, Doerfer) |
I have read of no one who passed it the first time. I didn’t pass it the first time. But fear not; this blog isn’t about driving and my intense frustration at what another blogger called a “Stalinist exercise in moral rectitude…,” but rather about what a Yank will suffer to get away from the crumbling hulk that is currently known as the U.S. of A.―the post-Dubya morass of hopelessness, punctuated by frequent instances of oligarchical excess and civil servant depravity.
I was lucky. I have both a U.S. and an E.U. passport, and so had the extreme luxury of being able to choose to live in a society more free than the U.S., and in which I can quibble with its inanities without fear of the U.S. Homeland Security Gestapo knocking at my door. I have returned to the fold that spawned America, in fact, and am wondering what all the fuss might have been about in 1776. Next to post-Dubya America, this place is paradise for the thinking human. But I digress.
This blog is about driving in the U.K. and assorted adjunct lifestyle issues. Naturally, it will begin with the foundational premise of any national driving scheme except perhaps that of France―saving lives and decreasing accidents. Fair enough. But fair warning, too: bureaucrats are in charge.
Road Safety: How safe is the UK, really?
While one can find all sorts of statistics concerning road safety, with wildly differing assessments of the US and the UK experience, it would seem reasonable to take the figures provided not by either nation (according to its own lights, the UK is a paragon in road safety), but rather a third party. I have, therefore, chosen a study by a group from the Netherlands. The Dutch, it seems to me, might be fairly even-handed when assessing nations other than their own, and indeed, on their graph, available here, the US and the UK are quite close in highway safety.
The graph is accompanied by a disclaimer that says volumes of traffic and high speeds were not factored in. If they had been, with high speeds creating more deadly crashes, the US would appear to be even safer than the UK, where with rare exceptions, highways are not both crowded and high-speed. Try crawling around the nominally 70 mph M25 motorway outside London for a prime example. Or try doing the listed 60 mph national speed limit on the tarmac cowpaths that serve as the roads policed by the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. Can’t be done. Crashes will be at low speeds, and therefore less deadly than a driver-error crash in Montana.
And yet, virtually all US driving tests, even the relatively tough one in New York State, are laughably passable next to the mental/emotional obstacle course that constitutes the UK driving test. Mind you, it isn’t the actual driving that’s hard. It’s dealing with the demands of the Stalinists. I would remind you that surviving in Stalinist Russia demanded that one obey the rules to the letter…except that no one would tell you what the rules really were. Just so the UK Practical Driving Test. Still, lots of driving lesson companies make lots of money because they contend they have figured it out and will tell you, for a price.
Agreed: Nervous drivers will NOT be good drivers
If I wanted to ensure that someone performed badly both mentally and physically, I would insist that they adhere to a number of procedures that were born in a bureaucratic haze, delivered to the population by vote-seeking politicians, and administered by underpaid law officer wannabes. Yes, that’s what I would do. That would create the free-society equivalent of the Stalinist miasma, see above.
I would further make pleasing the judgment of the wannabes so capricious as to constitute what the above-mentioned blogger referred to as a Stalinist exercise.
And to further ensure the greatest misery, particularly among those who have chosen to live in my nation―i.e., immigrants―I would not make any distinction in either taking or assessing the testing of those who have been driving successfully for, say, fifteen years or more and the basic, callow, home-grown 17-year-old who simply wants to emulate what he thinks his US peers do and boogie down the open road, beer in hand, radio blaring.
Yes, that is exactly what I would do.
And that is exactly what the U.K. has done.
Moreover, they have added a financial component. Not only does each practical test cost about $100 bucks, one has to pay the fee for each test. No retakes.
Plus, to save money, they have employed infinitely fewer brown shirts, I mean examiners, than needed, making the rule that one cannot repeat the test less than ten days after failing laughable. One is lucky to be able to book one in under 2.5 months, by which time the validity of one’s US license will have run out. To be legal, one will then have no choice but to book lessons (driving lessons for someone with a clean record for 46 years is sensible, no?) at a minimum of 22 pounds per hour. That’s pounds, not dollars. In dollars, today, it’s $36.02.
Driving to drive, and a menu of roadway treats
Nor can one book an hour, depending on where one lives. I live half an hour from the closest town offering tests. Since one is not actually taught to drive, but taught instead to do the hinky little things the examiner will demand in whatever hilly, curvy medieval town offers testing, one must go there to practice. So an hour and a half is the shortest lesson it is logical to book.
And then, when one gets there, one can choose from the following menu of enticing possibilities to practice:
- Reverse around a corner. Americans lack the DNA for this.
- Turn in roadway. (Doing it as the traditional 3-point turn is recommended; if you take 5 points, you lose one point of the 15 you are allowed to lose and still pass. Warning: Failing to look in your rear-view mirror when shifting on the open road will get you a point. For each instance. For 40 minutes. As my sister-in-law said, experienced drivers know what the heck is on the road around them and would be inclined to look only on downshifting to avoid being rear-ended. Who cares if the gap between your car and Auntie Maudie’s increases?)
- Parallel parking. (Laughable, especially to New Yorkers. You have TWO CAR LENGTHS do achieve it in. Actually, it’s hard to do that when you actually do know how to parallel park.)
- Back into a parking bay. So convenient if one is loading groceries in the trunk. What American DOES this?
- Dealing with roundabouts. That means traffic circles. Sometimes 3 lanes deep. Cheaper to build than cloverleaf structures, and infinitely more entertaining for drivers. Depending on the phrasing of the examiner, one will take the inside or outside lane. Listen up, Yank!
- Driving in first-gear through medieval streets that often go through buildings. Really.
- Negotiating a 1.5-car wide rural road that winds down to a bridge exactly 6 inches wider than a compact car. This route is not used, obviously, by larger vehicles; all driving instructors teach in compact cars.
- Getting onto a controlled access highway. Not a motorway; oh, no. Those are reserved for those who have passed the test and who, having never driven on a motorway (read I-95 in Atlanta, for example), will shove their tiny vehicle out there, blue-knuckled, trying to wedge between humongous lorries from Germany with the driver not on the right as are British drivers, but on the left, looking down on the top of one’s struggling Ford Ka. The highway is bad enough, because the lorry drivers don’t make the distinction between highway and motorway. Nor, except for differences in signage, need anyone else.
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