Back in the '90s I was at an international conference in Philadelphia, and there was a reception one night at a bar a few blocks away. The bar insisted on passports from the foreign attendees, who had been told by the conference organizers to leave their passports in the hotel safe and their IDs from home (driving licenses, etc.) should suffice at the bar. :smack: The bar attributed the passport requirement to a Pennsylvania liquor control regulation; they claimed they’d be liable to lose their liquor license if they accepted foreign non-passport IDs.
As about half the attendees were foreign, it was a fiasco until we spontaneously went to a small neighborhood bar and filled it absolutely to capacity. You could hardly move, much less check IDs, and that bar didn’t seem to care about any ostensible Pennsyl[del]tucky[/del]vania regulation.
I’ve had 6 different US driver’s licenses and what is required when changing states varied. I got my first license in Iowa. Moved to Missouri and had to retake both written and driving. Then moved to Arkansas and that was a straight swap. Same when moving to Nebraska then on to Kansas. My last US move was to Texas where I had to redo the written test. One thing that was common of all states is that an eye test was required.
When I moved to the UK I investigated ways to get a license without redoing a test. If I could claim residence in Germany I could do a swap, then swap that for a UK license. It turns out the UK test wasn’t that bad.
I lived in New York for three years and spent the entire time with a driver’s licence from British Columbia.
New York would not give me a driver’s licence because of my visa permit.
When I was an undergrad back in the 90s, one of my classmates was from Louisiana, and was constantly getting her ID refused at bars. Which was probably because Louisiana’s actual drivers’ licenses at the time not only looked fake, but they looked like the person who faked them didn’t even put in an actual effort at it.
She said that at some bars, the bouncers had a book of what all of the states’ licenses were supposed to look like, and whenever they saw an out-of-state license, would check it against the book. Well, they probably didn’t need to do that for New Jersey or Delaware (this was in Philadelphia), but for anywhere further afield than that.
