I don’t really think I need to know all the rules and saftey procedures of the road. I don’t need to know a whole lot about DOT regulations concerning commercial drivers, hazardous materials, or cross border truck safety inspections. I suppose I’m being a bit pedantic here but an encyclopedic knowledge of all the rules of the road would have very little practical value.
Odesio
You’re saying, in effect, that at least some of the rules (and let’s face it - in reality, probably most of them) don’t apply to you. You’re exactly why this should be mandatory.
How many people need to know what the maximum gross vehicle weight limit on different types of roads are when all they ever drive are passenger cars?
How many people need to know the exact legal limit for how far the tires are allowed to extend outside the wheel well?
How many people need to know the exact width of a traffic lane from the yellow to the white line?
How many people can be expected, as a matter of actual practicality, to be able to not only tell that their car is 150 feet from the back of another car traveling at 55 mph, but also stay at that distance without having other cars cut in?
Do you need to know an exact distance in front of or behind a school bus to stop when the red lights are flashing, or can you manage to avoid hitting any kids without a measuring tape?
In Australia (New South Wales):
At 16, you can sit your “Driver Knowledge Test”, a theory test that you need to pass to get your learner’s permit. You then need to do 120 hours of driving (including night driving) with a licensed driver sitting next to you, and this must be recorded in a log book. If you are under 25, you must hold a learner’s permit for at least a year before sitting the practical test. Your blood alcohol limit is ZERO. You are restricted to a maximum speed of 80kmh. You need to display black and yellow “L” plates on the front and rear of your car. There are restrictions on carrying young passengers. You can’t tow anything. You must hold a learner’s permit for at least six months before sitting the practical test.
The practical driving test is a tough one, and you are scored on such things as hill starts, reverse parking, three point turns, smooth operation of the controls, traffic awareness, lane changing, etc. However, if you break any road rules, you will fail automatically, regardless of score.
If you pass the practical driving test, you will be issued a “P1” licence. This is a provisional licence. You will be restricted to a maximum speed of 90kmh. You must display red and white “P” plates on the front and rear of your car. Your blood alcohol limit must be zero. You can’t accumulate more than three demerit points (fully licensed drivers have 12)You can only tow the lightest of trailers (250kg). You cannot even use the hands free function of a cell phone. If aged under 25, you can only carry one person under 21 at night. You can’t drive a manual vehicle if you passed the test in an automatic. Some vehicles are prohibited (very high-powered cars, etc).
After a minimum of twelve months on a P1 licence, you can sit the “Hazard Perception Test”. This is a touch screen test that shows you fifteen video clips of traffic situations, and asks you what you would do in each given situation.
If you pass the Hazard Perception Test, you can get a P2 licence. You will be restricted to a speed of 100kmh. You must display green P plates on the front and rear of your car. Blood alcohol limit is zero. You can’t accumulate more than six demerit points (fully licensed drivers have 12). Some vehicles are prohibited (very high-powered cars, etc).
After you have held the P2 licence for TWO YEARS, you may sit the Driver Qualification Test. This is a computer-based test of two parts, revising driver knowledge and hazard perception.
Only then may you gain your full licence. If you got your learner’s permit on your sixteenth birthday, you’d now be a minimum of 19 1/2 years old.
Now, this isn’t in a small, densely-populated place like the UK. Australia is even sparser than the US. We have US-style sprawling suburbs, car culture, and shitty public transport.
But we get by. Society hasn’t collapsed because getting a licence is tough. And it’s saved lives along the way.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen a post composed of 5 strawmen nothing else. So you get some points for that, at least.
I’m sure you’re quite aware that this isn’t what I mean but I suppose reductio absurdum is a popular method of argument. What I’m saying is that a lot of them aren’t important for me to know because of the type of driving I typically engage in. I do not need to know all the rules and regulations when it comes to commercial vehicles because I do not drive a commercial vehicle. I do not need to know the rules and regulations for transporting 1,000 gallons of gasoline on a state road because, again, I do not transport that much gasoline.
In the abstract, yeah, they’re applicable to me should I ever become a commercial driver or need to get qualified to transport hazardous material. Aside from that it’s pretty much just usless knowledge. Expecting your average driver to know all the rules and regulations of the road is just plain assinine.
Odesio
I posed a quite reasonable question here, but no one seems to have taken it up.
Why is it that certain US states have a relatively low accident rate, whilst others are as bad as the very worst in Europe, why is there such a huge disparity, because when you look at US driver licencing laws state by state, they are all fairly similar.
Shagnasty did make some sot of reply to this, I wish others would also do the same.
Surely there must be some reasons, and you would think it might be good practice to ensure that the higher standards in some states are passed to the remainder. I would think this should be reasonably straightforward thing to do as the living conditions cannot be too far differant.
You said he/she needs to know all the rules. He listed a bunch of rules that it would be more or less useless to know, which you would fail the test for, and would make no actual difference in your driving safety. He is showing why the loading up of the testing with hundreds or thousands or rules is stupid. How can this be called a strawman argument.
I got my first driver’s license in Pakistan in 1983. I didn’t take any test, theory or practice. I just paid a “driving school” a wad of cash and two photographs. I didn’t get any lessons. They (the “school”) gave me a learners permit after a couple of days. They then gave me full driver’s license after a few weeks, certainly not more than a couple of months. If I had tried to go through the “normal channels” I might still be waiting for them to process my application for the learner’s permit. (A friend of mine had a religious objection to paying bribes, he waited 22 years to get a telephone at his house, from 1969 to 1993, every little thing in his life takes an extraordinary amount of time, because instead of paying bribes he needs to find someone with influence in the right places).
And guess what? If I had gone through and mastered the freaking Pakistan Highway Code, it would have made no difference, because the other drivers didn’t know or care.
What makes driving dangerous is the fact that we break the few important rules that we all know. All the time. And we get caught too infrequently to make a difference to us. I am technically speeding 90% of the way home from work, every day, unless it is snowing or traffic is snarled. My wife probably last came to a complete stop at a stop sign in 1990 when she took her driving test. She has never gotten a ticket.
99.9% of drivers know perfectly well the illegal things that cause most accidents, that are not caused by simple inattention.
You can too in Europe. It’s not like there’s a subway station in every village. I live in Paris, and certainly doesn’t need (or even want) a car. However, I was raised in a small village in the middle of nowhere, and you can bet that there a car is required for everything. Someone without a driver’s license is going to have a big problem.
But he’s also going to have a big problem if he’s jailed, for instance. While in jail, he won’t be working, won’t be able to pay his rent or mortgage and will lose his home as a result, his children will be in trouble, and so on. So, are you arguing that people shouldn’t be jailed, either? Of course not.
The issue is whether or not one think that road delinquency is a very serious issue. We’ve no problem devastating the life of someone by sending him to jail if he’s, for instance, a thief. By comparison, regardless of how inconvenient it is, a suspended driving license is a better deal. So, you can’t say that revoking or suspending licenses shouldn’t be done just because it has such a negative impact on someone’s life. The only question should be : is a DUI (for instance) bad enough to warrant a severe punishment? Most people seem to answer no, but you can certainly argue that yes, it is, and that there’s no reason to be more concerned about the driver who lose his license than about the thief who is jailed.
Plus, you can allow the delinquent to drive to and from work, for instance, which significantly mitigate the hardship.
Why do you and catsix keep bringing up CDL rules like we’re trying to teach everybody to drive truck? I haven’t seen anybody else mention that in this thread. We’re talking about Class D operators, not commercial drivers.
Because no one said anything about loading up the testing with hundreds or thousands of rules.
You mean that you get fined even if you don’t speed?
It’s too bad that not every delinquent can be caught. Personally, I’m happy to know that at least in the case of speeding they can be easily caught and punished. You’re basically complaining that it’s too easy to catch the culprits…because…well, I suspect because you’re a culprit too. Otherwise, you wouldn’t mind it any more than you would complain about car thieves or axe murderers being caught too easily.
Now, you could argue that speeding isn’t a serious issue and that people shouldn’t be punished for it, but in this case, we’re going to strongly disagree.
I am absolutely in favor of speed enforcement, as well as every other type of traffic enforcement of existing rules. The number of speeders is enormous, if you define speeding as anything over the speed limit. Even the number of speeders over 10mph is enormous. But you cannot deny that the location of enforcement is typically related to the ease of writing oodles of tickets per hour (in “speed traps” where there is a sudden change in the speed limit, and where there is potential for concealment of the police cruiser). It is a revenue game. At least in our town in Massachusetts, it is blatantly a revenue game, if you ever go to the town selectmen’s meetings you would see that they make no attempt to conceal it. As long as we can hit a fair proportion of “out of towners” on the main through routes, everyone is happy with the money.
I drive by an elementary school every day on the way to work, after I drop off my own toddler at day care. I may be the only person who actually slows down to under 20mph in front of the school. I get lots of flashing headlights and horns blowing from behind me. But having a toddler really gives you an idea about how unpredictable kids are, and even coming to a dead stop from 20 mph is not a trivial thing. I have never in four years seen a police cruiser at that school, because it is straight stretch of road with nowhere for the cruiser to hide.
You’ll have to excuse me, Cisco, because when you typed this:
bolding mine
I just assumed that all the rules and safety procedures of the road really meant all of the rules and safety procedures of the road. Now that we’ve established that we only mean Class D licenses I suppose we can go forward. I’m still not convinced that that a refresher course will benefit me enough to justify the extra expense and loss of time necessary to take them. I will concede that it’s certainly possible I’ll learn something I’d forgotten but, then again, if I haven’t used it in all my years of driving it probably isn’t that important anyway.
Odesio
The Massachusetts Drivers Manual is 140 pages long. This is what you are given to study for the existing test. Unless you count for example “The Seat Belt Law” (three pages long) as one rule, there are certainly hundreds of rules in the manual.
But the test I took in Virginia twenty years ago was a joke. 90% of the answers are obvious to anyone who has never read the Manual. And the driving test was in the parking lot of a suburban mall, that wasn’t even open yet. Okay, we had to drive from the RMV parking lot across a four-lane road (through a stop light) to get to the mall and back. But the whole thing took five minutes. I would agree that the driving component should have been tougher.
Again, you either didn’t understand what I wrote, or you’re being deliberately obtuse and pedantic. I said that unless you had done that, then you don’t know everything, and you could learn something. And just because something doesn’t happen the first 9,999 times you drive down a road, doesn’t mean it won’t happen the 10,000th time. I’ll restate here that you and people like you are exactly the reason I feel the way I do about this. You’re cocky.
If I was being obtuse and pedantic (nice word by the way) I don’t think I would have conceded that I might learn something nor did I claim to know everything. Again, I’m just not convinced that what can be gained from a refresher course is worth the time and expense of taking one, and, quite frankly, nobody here has really given me any reason to think it’d be worth my time. If that makes me cocky then you set the cocky bar at a pretty low level.
Now some sort of advanced driver’s course that taught you how to skid, drive in bad road conditions, etc., would likely be useful. But a refresher course? I doubt it.
Odesio
taking a refresher class, lets say 4 hours. cost would be 50$ or so. if you cant afford 50$ and 4 hours every 5-10 years I dont know what to say.
if you think you dont have anything to learn or have doubts about what you would learn being useful give them up. I teach teens but I deal with parents all the time, parents are always encouraged to come along on drives and I have never spent an hour with a teen and had the parent in the back come away with nothing. some times its something astoundingly obvious (like moms who fucking text while driving wtf lady?) to things much more subtle to a simple new way of seeing things.
and as Theloadeddog points out there are already strict as hell rules in places very similar to America that work just fine
for the poster who was asking about the radical differences between states (worry omw to work very soon) I dont have the charts in front of me but Montana is probably lower on the list than say Washington simply due to population density. its a lot harder to crash into another car when there arent any around.
Regarding basic rules of the road: I recall a thread here ages ago where we were discussing who has right of way, a right turner or an oncoming left turner, both turning into the same lane. I’d say the opinions were split about 50/50 on that issue. I know that is just anecdotal, but I’d say it is fairly indicative of the level of knowledge of common and critical driving laws amongst the driving population. We don’t need to get into esoteric air brake rules and regs to start finding rules that the general population don’t know.
One of the most dangerous things that happens while driving are individual drivers doing their own thing and not being predictable; if we all know and follow the same rules, it greatly reduces the chances of running into something unexpected. The driving training that your average North American gets in no way assures that they either know the rules or understand why they’re important.
Then don’t say anything. I’m more concerned about the 4 hours then I am the $50 and the question remains as to whether or not the class would be useful for me. I mean useful in some way besides simply allowing me to continue to drive.
As I have already conceded I’m sure I’d walk away with something I either forgot or was never taught, however, in and of itself, this does not necessarily make the class worth my time.
Odesio