I would happily resubmit to the driver exam every five years if that were the norm. It would remove or reform sooo many dangerous drivers. I think regular retesting is also superior to only retesting elderly drivers, because it’s a level mechanism for everyone that avoids ageism. Lots of younger and middle age drivers are menaces, too. It’s less about prohibiting them from vehicle use, more about making sure they’re actually ready for that use.
I’d be up for a 10 year resubmit and then after you are older than 70 it keeps decreasing. No issue retaking it as long as it’s just like a theory and maybe an hour or 2 on the road with a driving instructor and it’s not as expensive as doing it the first time. (20+ mandatory instructor hours don’t come cheap).
Considering how many people don’t know the basics in regards to driving law (e.g. under what circumstances you are allowed to use the horn, driving only so fast that you can stop before any danger that you can presently not see, parking rules, …), I’d say 5 years is even too long of an interval, not too short of one.
There’s four potential parts to a license renewal:
medical check
theory test
driving test
submitting an up-to-date photo and printing the new license
In any civilized country, people have a yearly medical check (for health purposes) regardless, so you could just add the driver’s license check to that.
Theory tests can be done on a PC, so you don’t need a lot of humans to supervise. One should be enough for dozens of parallel tests just to make sure nobody is cheating.
The photo and printing part hardly takes any personell and can be outsourced super easily.
Leaves the actual driving test. In most countries the training required to become a driving examiner is really easy, often just a 1-3 month course. So it should be rather trivial to increase the capacity there. In my country there aren’t even any full-time employees doing driving exams, they are all part-time, because the amount of required employees for that job is so low.
Agree to the first arguments but the last one not so much. We have fuckall capacity here and you can wait up to 3 months to even get a free date to take your driving test because there is so few people doing the grading.
But still, that’s a really easy thing to fix. People pay for their own exams, so if there’s more demand, more people will get into this super easy to train job.
The safety testing is a problem because they often test vehicles solely against other vehicles in their class. Meaning a 5 star safety rating on a small car is only 5 stars against another small car. Against the suburban down the street it’d be illegal to produce them for the safety violations.
so…
maybe cars also need stricter regulations?
They do. Especially in the US where cars that are barely held together are allowed on the roads and getting a driver licence is easy as cake.
I would happily resubmit to the driver exam every five years if that were the norm. It would remove or reform sooo many dangerous drivers. I think regular retesting is also superior to only retesting elderly drivers, because it’s a level mechanism for everyone that avoids ageism. Lots of younger and middle age drivers are menaces, too. It’s less about prohibiting them from vehicle use, more about making sure they’re actually ready for that use.
I’d be up for a 10 year resubmit and then after you are older than 70 it keeps decreasing. No issue retaking it as long as it’s just like a theory and maybe an hour or 2 on the road with a driving instructor and it’s not as expensive as doing it the first time. (20+ mandatory instructor hours don’t come cheap).
Considering how many people don’t know the basics in regards to driving law (e.g. under what circumstances you are allowed to use the horn, driving only so fast that you can stop before any danger that you can presently not see, parking rules, …), I’d say 5 years is even too long of an interval, not too short of one.
The issue with it being less than 5 year IMO is that you would not have the capacity to test so many people so often.
Tbh, I don’t really see that as an issue.
There’s four potential parts to a license renewal:
In any civilized country, people have a yearly medical check (for health purposes) regardless, so you could just add the driver’s license check to that.
Theory tests can be done on a PC, so you don’t need a lot of humans to supervise. One should be enough for dozens of parallel tests just to make sure nobody is cheating.
The photo and printing part hardly takes any personell and can be outsourced super easily.
Leaves the actual driving test. In most countries the training required to become a driving examiner is really easy, often just a 1-3 month course. So it should be rather trivial to increase the capacity there. In my country there aren’t even any full-time employees doing driving exams, they are all part-time, because the amount of required employees for that job is so low.
Agree to the first arguments but the last one not so much. We have fuckall capacity here and you can wait up to 3 months to even get a free date to take your driving test because there is so few people doing the grading.
But still, that’s a really easy thing to fix. People pay for their own exams, so if there’s more demand, more people will get into this super easy to train job.
The safety testing is a problem because they often test vehicles solely against other vehicles in their class. Meaning a 5 star safety rating on a small car is only 5 stars against another small car. Against the suburban down the street it’d be illegal to produce them for the safety violations.