Terrifying, but I drove for only two hours before getting my driver's license in California. At the time (and possibly still) you didn't have to have driver's training courses to take the test if you were 18+.
In Germany you have to take theory lessons and test as well as practical lessons including some time highway (Autobahn) and at night. In the end there is a practical test, which (from anecdotal observation) a notable amount of people fail on first attempt.
But once you have the license you can drive on highways without speed limits, where safety and following rules is important (while the free ride is a bit of a myth - many segments have speed limits, there is lots of traffic limiting speed and in case of an accident insurance restrict payment when going fast)
I'm not sure it's universally true. I didn't but that was years ago at a private school and I still took a summer Drivers Ed class for insurance reasons.
Given that most students do get a drivers license, it wouldn't be surprising if Drivers Ed were a mandatory part of some high school curricula. Note that this is probably just the theory part in most cases and doesn't include actual on the road instruction. (Which is typically done by parents or by a company--the latter again in part for insurance price reasons.)
Drivers Ed was an optional summer course in my district, and did include an on-road component. Not required at all (although the insurance company gave a discount for completing it).
HS graduation requirements vary (in some cases, much more than you would think) between districts. Usually, each town/city has its own district -- in rural areas a district may span many towns, in more urban areas, you may have more than one district in a single city. There are state guidelines, but we also have 50 different states. Federal guidelines are pretty sparse, and often only enforced by accepting funding -- don't take their money and you don't have to play by their rules.
I suspect that there is no blanket statement about the US public school system that will hold true nationwide (except, perhaps "it could be better" or "it makes no sense").
The reaction to not having a license is probably simply due to 60+ years of "The American Dream" for a kid was having their own car and the freedom^tm that came with it, and the simple fact that in the majority of the country, public transportation is crap, and our cities are not designed around walking. So a car, and license, is pretty much a requirement.
It varies by state. In Illinois, Drivers Ed is required to graduate high school (exemptions for, e.g., visually impaired persons were not introduced until the 80s iirc). Illinois has some weird requirements for education. Except for the Chicago public school district, four years of P.E. is also required for graduation which really annoyed me because I would rather have had that time slot to take academic classes.
I failed the test three times in Germany. After the second time I switched school, and basically had to start from scratch. Probably ended up costing me 5000€ or close to 10000€. And since that was in 2009, with the perfect time to put everything in the stock market, the opportunity costs were like 100000€.
I was curious about the "most pass" as I know so many stories of people who failed (I passed on first attempt myself)
First article I found from 2018, citing numbers from 2017, says 37% fail theory, 28% during practical test, which is quite a lot, considering that you have extra training lessons and instructors should know what's being tested (conspiracy theory would be: failed test leads to more lessons and more fees)
https://m.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/knapp-37-pro...
This is still true. I moved from AZ to CA when I was 17 and my AZ permit expired. It was way easier and cheaper to wait until I turned 18 so that I didn't have to pay for the requisite driving training courses. Oddly enough, Drivers Ed is required to pass high school, but if you get your training or your license before you graduate you can supply them with the documentation and still get the credit.
With my birthday being in July, I technically should have had to take a Drivers Ed course, but because I moved my senior year of high school, I basically got a lot of free credits because the state requirements were different and I would have had to essentially take an extra year of HS if they didn't just hand me credits. It's weird.
I don't understand what you mean. Is it terrifying to have to get so much practice before being allowed to drive on your own, or terrifying to drive with only two hours' experience?
Belgium - 7.3
United States - 7.3
Slovenia - 7.0
Japan - 6.4
France - 5.8
Finland - 5.1
Canada - 5.1 [similar requirements as US for license]
Germany - 4.2
I know France, Belgium, and the USA have no proper driver's education and that Germany and the Netherlands do (other countries I would have to look up). In Belgium, people learn from their parents and then take the exam and therefore keep repeating most of their parents' mistakes plus their own. Everyone in Germany and the Netherlands that I've talked to agrees that Belgians are terrible drivers, and France has a similar system and seem to be just as bad (though with fewer data points because they're further away).
From your link: Belgium=7.3, France=5.8, USA=7.3 versus Germany=4.2, Netherlands=4.7. I don't know what the P-value on that is (I never thought of looking at this until you mentioned it) but so far it looks like the data matches intuition.
Of course, there's a lot more factors, like that in the USA and Germany have towns much further apart than the Netherlands (I've said before that in NL you're never more than a few minutes away from being at least in hearing distance of the nearest human). This makes public transport much worse and those who don't like driving may be obliged to, but also the infrastructure costs more when there are fewer inhabitants per km² to make use of each road which should make the infrastructure worse. Indeed, driving from NL into Germany during rain, the highways instantly and universally turn from nearly dry (due to permeable concrete) to lots of spatting and aquaplaning risk.
I'm also not sure fatalities is the only thing we should be looking at. NL is higher than Germany but if you have more city traffic than highway traffic, you probably hit more bicycles and pedestrians despite better infrastructure.
Not sure why you would say the US doesn't have proper drivers education. I took a mandatory semester class in high school (in the 80s) with a proper curriculum, a driving simulator, a dedicated paved training area, cars with instructor brake pedals, and lots of scary movies on how we could kill ourselves and others with bad driving...
From what I read in this thread and on reddit, in the USA (somewhat state-dependent) you can drive with almost no experience in a vehicle that has zero safety standards (some states only check up on emissions, others don't even check that, or so people on reddit said).
Heh, I'm dating myself, but I got my first license at 14 in Idaho. The only thing I needed was a 10 minute practical exam and to pass the written exam. There was no minimum required hours of driving (Scary, I know!)
They've since changed it to 16 with 50 hours of supervised driving.
It’s 14 here in Arkansas for a learner’s permit, and 16 for a full license. The permit requires a written test (that’s trivial), and you have have a permit for six months if you’re under 18 I think.
You can get a limited ”hardship” license to go to school or work at 14.
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