My licence, it was implied, was barely worth the paper it was printed on. In Tenerife, it was rumoured, no one had ever passed the test on the first try.Īnother refrain I kept hearing was that the place where I had learned to drive - the United States - had one of the world's least stringent tests. The Swedes, the story had it, made you do elaborate manoeuvres on a skid-pan. The German test, it was said, was an exercise more masochistic than viewing the Eurovision song contest. In several years' research for my book Traffic, across many countries, I kept hearing of similarly outlandish questions, usually accompanied by some knowing chatter about the comparative national difficulty of driving tests. This will discourage pedestrians from behaving recklessly." The correct answer is something of a national refrain, gaily sung from Bournemouth to Blyth: you should expect the rider to go in any direction! On the French test, I had read, lurked this query: "If you are driving down the road and a woman with a pram steps out from the pavement, should you stop or keep going?" The answer, which seems part of some covert Gallic population-reduction scheme, is: "Keep going.
I was told of a nettlesome question from the UK test that has taken on a near-mythological status namely, what to do when approaching a horse and rider on a roundabout. It is a strange world, marked by an aching pedantry, Talmudic parsings of fine-printed traffic tomes, and ridiculously hypothetical scenarios that tend to have nothing at all to do with the traffic environment in which we will spend our lives.Īny driver, anywhere, can recall the darker moments of these tests. But for most of us, these kinds of scenarios are encountered in one place only: the driving test.
#US DRIVING TEST VS UK DRIVING TEST HOW TO#
Given the chaotic nature of China's rapidly filling roads - one in seven Beijing drivers in 2004 was a novice - knowing how to deal with such gruesome contingencies might be wise.
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