Oh man, the whole driving school process in France is so dumb and painful. It is layers of bureaucracy upon layers of bureaucracy. It is the worst in Paris, where you are going to have to wait longer and pay more to get a license. I have an increasing number of friends in their late 20s/early 30s who live in large French cities and don't even have a license - they live and work in the city, so it's not a problem for them.
When they do need to visit family in the more rural areas, they either take the train, or use a carpooling service (the most popular one is blablacar.com, which has been taking off like crazy in the recent years. The vast majority of French people I talk to when I go back home have heard of it- one of the few innovative French startups).
In France, I spent a year and half and about 1500 euros in driving lessons related stuff and didn't get my license. When I first moved to the US (southern state), it cost me something like 30 bucks and 30 minutes of my time. The test consisted of driving around the block, and parking the car (only snag: the inspector by my side, a rather overweight lady, told me that I'd lose points the further away I parked from the DMV's front door. I thought she was joking, but she wasn't).
The conservative French people say that more expensive, stricter, longer times for obtaining a driver license leads to safer roads; but if you compare US driving fatalities to French ones, there's not much of a difference- and people in the US drive way more than they do in France.
Like many other aspects of French culture, it's ridiculous how deeply legislated it is, and how the only ones benefitting from it are the ones making the rules. I find certain aspects of the US driving culture a little too much on the other extreme of the spectrum (learner's permit at 14? the driving test being just a drive around the block? the written test being a multiple choice questionnaire with the answers available on YouTube?), but France is worse by far, and it's hurting young professionals (my brother is without a college degree, and when he was unemployed he found that most jobs in rural areas require a car- but getting a license takes forever and is expensive. So that was a few months where he could do little but wait to get his driving license).
> it cost me something like 30 bucks and 30 minutes of my time
It cost you 30 bucks and 30 minutes of your time to pass the exam, not to learn how to drive. That’s what is costly in France, because it costs ~€50/hour to have someone teaching you how to drive. People usually take at least 20 hours to learn, which is 20x50 = €1000. If you already know how to drive you can bypass the whole process and pass the exam as a “candidat libre”, which is free [1] (but it’s hard to get a slot).
Where I learned in the US, we had a few weeks of driver's ed classes in HS, then practiced with an instructor for a bit. After that, getting a permit then a license was simple enough. At this point, I don't get anything more than vision tests and I don't actually have to renew my license until I'm 60 or something.
As far I can tell, though it's not said explicitly in the linked article, you still have to justify that you have driven 20 hours in a car with dual-command (which will cost you 15-20€/hour to rent). That might be better than going through a driving school, but that's definitely not as cheap as the US.
I did pass my test 14 years ago with 20,00 hours of driving lessons and 2400F (a ridiculous 350€). In the recent years, I know no-one who passed the test with less than 28 hours, and that's an unilateral decision on the school side.
(another french here).
I sadly agree on everything said here...
I would like to add that in my opinion, the main problem in France is that everything related to driving is now turned into a business.
Usually the driving test is less about driving and more about how long they can keep you in the DMV to charge you money. There is not a lot of preparation to the driving test itself in order to fail the test the first time (so they can charge you after that). I've also seen verbal agreements between driving inspectors and DMV's (I guess this is easier to do on the country side).
the driving test being just a drive around the block?
This varies. Driving is regulated at the state level, not the federal, and even then, it's pretty subjective.
I grew up poor, so didn't get my first license until I was 22. I was in a small town in Oklahoma, so there was one place to take it. First two times I failed; the officer grading the test was pretty much by the book. Third time, it was a laid back dude, and he didn't even have me parallel park. Gave me a 97 or something crazy like that.
I'm pretty sure there are only 2 states where that's the case. It's definately not a normal thing for the vast majority of Americans. It's 15 in most states 16 in a few.
Edit: It's actually 5 states, plus 3 more that allow teenagers to get learners permits at between 14.5 and 15 with additional drivers education requirements.
Here's the numbers on just how many.
If you include Michigan with full permits at 14.75 at the asbolute earliest (though most teens wouldn't be able to complete a 40 hour drivers education course that fast so the average will be even closer to 15)--then around 7.3% of teenagers can get their learners permit sometime during their 14th year.
You're right. That list is a bit more complicated than it looks though. There are 5 states that allow a teenager to get a learners permit on their 14th birthday.
I was aware of Iowa and Sout Dakota, but I wasn't aware that North Dakota, Kansans, and Arkansas do this as well.
Michigan and Idaho issue learners permits at 14 years and 8 months, and 14 years and 6 months respectively. However they only allow driving during a drivers education class until that course is completed. Also Montanta issues permits at 14.5 if enrolled in a drivers ed class.
Most of these states are also very rural with very small populations, so the vast majority of American 14 year olds cannot get a learners permit.
> the driving test being just a drive around the block?
it varies quite a bit by DMV location. i've seen a weak correlation between local traffic levels and test duration/difficulty. which isn't the most unreasonable thing.
i'd like to see the folks who administer the test given some feedback about the number of licensees they tested who had an accident in their first year driving. and then provided the mean value for other testers in their zip code/state/etc.
Can't agree more. The system is retarded here. I didn't have the time to pass my license before leaving the country so I had to repay it when I came back from a year abroad. I failed the test then had to wait 6 months to retake it. I just gave up and I will wait to live in another country where it's cheaper and faster to get a license. I have many friends my age (mid 20s) who don't own a license either. If you live in a city you usually don't need one, if you want to travel you either take the train or use blablacar as parent said.
The last figure is how safety comparisons are usually done. The first two don't really make any sense to compare for exactly the reason you cite: they spend less time in their cars, so they have less time for their driving skill to be reflected in the fatality rate.
Ideally you'd control for the length of the trip, types of roads they're traveling on, etc, but that data is nearly impossible to come by.
I think you'd really also need to normalize by age of the driver. I suspect that younger (under 21, say) drivers are more dangerous in both countries, but that in places where it's expensive and time consuming the licensed drivers will tend to be older.
I don't see why you'd normalize for that. I don't doubt that age is a factor, but surely the effect due to age should actually be counted. For example, different safety standards in cars will result in different fatality rates. That doesn't mean you try to eliminate that from the picture by normalizing for it, that means that the country with better safety standards is actually safer. If a country's roads are safer because they discourage or prevent younger drivers from driving, should not that additional safety count? Taken to an extreme: if a country allows 8-year-olds to drive cars and has a massive road fatality rate because of it, that shouldn't be normalized away when comparing with a country where you can't get a license until 18, right?
So my supposition is that although you're allowed to drive at 18 in France, the burden they place on licensing reduces the number of 18 year olds who actually do so, which has the effect of artificially aging their population of drivers. If you want to know how effective the training is, then you might need to normalize for age to eliminate that effect. If the discussion were about differences in how old you need to be to drive, then I'd agree with you, but the article is about the burdensome regulation around driver training.
If the regulations disproportionately discourage more dangerous demographics from driving, shouldn't that count as a safety improvement just as much as prohibiting them from driving altogether? Burdensome regulations are keeping a large number of dangerous drivers off the road. Shouldn't that be considered a win? (Not necessarily one that outweighs the costs, but in isolation that's a good thing, no?)
I'm not saying it isn't a win, necessarily. I'm saying we don't know if the training is what's causing the win, or if it's just the different demographic. Maybe you could get the exact same effect by either raising the driving age to 21, or keeping the driving age the same but otherwise (through fees and other burdens) discouraging people under 21 from driving. If that were the case (and I have no idea if it is or not), then you'd be unnecessarily costing people time and money, to no good effect.
Fair points, but on the other hand, part of the purpose of training can be to weed out people who are unsuitable for doing whatever you're training for. Maybe there are better ways to do it, but even if rigorous training just weeds out the reckless people and doesn't help the others, I'd still call that an advantage of rigorous training. Of course, it's reasonable to wonder if it helps the others too.
Yep, makes sense. Would be great to know if we could skip the test for people over age X, but maybe just making it expensive for people under that age is a good idea.
Number of vehicles on the road is not the same as miles/hours traveled.
America is much bigger country and people presumably drive much more than in Europe. So naturally vehicle deaths per 100K cars is higher in the US (because more time is spent at risk), irrespective of training/skill level.
7.6 per 1 billion km in US against 6.3 per 1 billion km in France. I would say very comparable especially if you consider that more older/younger people drive in US than in France.
Meanwhile, 4.3 in the UK, a country demographically similar to France and where it's trivial to get a car and license. This makes me think the process of getting a license plays a big role in fatality rates, but more road quality, layout, better street furniture, signage, etc (which are all notably better in the UK than France).
Since you've done both, are the parent article and other comments in this thread overemphasizing how difficult it is in France or did I just have a great experience here? I've done the test twice in the UK (auto + manual) - it wasn't arduous, nor did it take long to schedule (I think it was about 3 weeks out) and the computerised test was a case of picking the least stupid answer, unlike the riddles the parent article implies the French have to navigate.
The actual driving test is pretty much the same length and difficulty. (although I did the car test in France and the motorbike test in the UK)
The French theory test needs a bit more preparation as more trick questions are asked.
Also, the difference is perhaps, as far as I can remember, that French driving school offer more preparation to the theory test than is really required. In other words, they can keep you coming to the classroom until they are sure you will pass the theory...
Yes per 100,000 inhabitants, but to determine driver safety the correct metric is fatalities per x unit of distance driven, which is what the GP was using.
People in the US drive far more often than those in France, you'd expect for driving fatalities.
For San Francisco/Peninsula DMV locations, the drive test is reasonably challenging and involves signal use, merging, making unprotected turns, backing, and complex intersections. I failed it twice with my parent's car and resumed my attempt to pass a few years later, this time paying for lessons.
Like every other merit-oriented institution, there's an industry around gaming this system. Besides having valuable information about test details, the driving schools get to jump ahead of the line and get earlier test dates and plusher time slots, and take their lesson fee on top of the test fee. The message is pretty clear: Fork up the cash to go through a school if you want to get your license in a timely fashion.
The schools themselves vary from utter crap to the guy that I went with(Mr. Yu), who has done it part time for over 20 years and has perfect knowledge of all three of the designated routes the Daly City examiners use, tips for each intersection, tips for some specific examiners(!), and a pleasant and persistent attitude. Mr. Yu is popular enough to be booked solid for a month in advance, but apart from that there's hardly any wasted time - I am paying about $700 for three sessions of two hours(that time including pickup and dropoff, all of which I drove on my own) and the test itself, which I'm taking in September.
It's not a bad thing that people take trains rather than drive or that economic incentives favor living in cities.
Those are, in fact, things a country can want - for a multitude of reasons. Environmental impact, cultural centers, oil politics, etc. The fact that car-centric suburban culture is difficult to attain may be feature, not a bug.
This article does not describe a democratic process leading to a consensus that driving should be minimized. This article describes rent seekers abusing regulations at the expense of a populace that in fact needs to drive whtether it wants to or not.
As a 29, unemployed, native french man, this shows perfectly how france has many examples of over-regulations. I'm currently doing driving lessons, the unemployment institution, pole emploi paid for 90% of the cost. It cost something like 30 or 50 euros per hour. It's crazy when you think how important transportation is in a developed country.
I'm usually for socialism in general, but not if it completely hinders the economy and reduce opportunity, and sets in monopolies.
The government recently did a study, and it showed that small but important local businesses like pharmacists, bakeries, notaires (civil law notaries), tobacco sellers, alcohol resellers, kiosks, doctors, and many more, are heavily regulated, and tend to be monopolies because the government don't deliver that many licenses.
It's weird because I tend to have leftish beliefs when it comes to politics, but you can't deny that you need to relax the rules if you don't want to have those kinds of situations.
I never worked more than 2 months in total in my life, I just wish I could just pick a shovel and do any kind of demeaning work for a change, just for the sanity of waking up in the morning to do something. It's just not possible because of labor laws and a high minimum wage. France is anti-liberal in many aspects, and it's not just sad, it's just depressing. I just can't like my country. I like many things, but in terms of economic opportunities, it's soviet-like. People just receive welfare, stay unemployed, get unmotivated, and this settles in, and there's nothing concrete you can really do for a change if you don't have a network.
At least in the US, there are shitty jobs by default. In france, the only one negociating are the unions. Companies can't even fire people unless they did real damage to the company. Nobody gets hired because of that.
Sometimes I honestly believe I could try to just become an illegal immigrant and go to places where they give work to strangers, but it's hard to give up comfort.
It's a life of being rewarded for being lazy. It's weird.
You're young, clearly you don't like the status quo, what's keeping you there? I find it hard to feel sympathy, but I don't know whatever situation you may be in. Don't let the structural problems of your country hinder you, be part of the change.
Zero work experience. You can't really change country without finding a job first in another country, or at least having a plan. I would gladly work any job to become an US citizen or canadian citizen. Sweden, Norway, Finland, any cold country.
I don't know how to search for a permanent job abroad. I don't want to just do tourism and work abroad for one year. There always seems to be tons of discouraging paperwork. Canada requires you to have 2000 euros or more if you want to go there. With 9/11 the US will be a difficult place to go as I don't have any job experience.
> I find it hard to feel sympathy
I don't care about your sympathy, I'm not asking for it. Nobody has sympathy anyway. What do you mean by that anyway ?
> be part of the change
What does that even mean ? I don't care about change, I just want to get out in the morning, do anything that can be done, and go back home.
Like I always say, where can I pick a shovel and start working ? Job applications are stupid too, there are always requirements, and nothing about the real supply and demand of the job market for that kind of job.
Hey jokoon, you're clearly in a rut, and it's clouding your thinking and decision making. Your attitude needs to shift from where it is because, presently, it's so negative that it amounts to self-sabotage. I would suggest seeking some help, any help. It'll be lousy, and you'll have to wade through a different morass of bureaucracy, and unhelpful people, but eventually I strongly feel you'll be able to shift yourself from where you are.
Things don't magically get better in other countries. Each has it's own set of crap that people there have to deal with. But you know this.
No wonder I meet so many French programmers in Silicon Valley.
They always seem to pine for France, but they still stay in California. Its also really weird how fond and romantically they look upon such regulations. You'd think that they would be furious at the thought of such regulations in America, but they are actually pretty sympathetic about them. Even though such regulations have tied up the job market in France so much that they have been driven to a new continent, they still have faith in the State to fix things with rules.
That is one of the reasons I think libertarians can never win in the long run. Even very smart engineers have boundless optimism for the capacity of human managers to micromanage complicated systems like entire national economies. They also have boundless faith that bad actors and inside players can be prevented from manipulating regulations for their own benefit.
I am a French dev and I plan to move to the Silicon Valley for various reasons but the driver licence is not one of them.
It is the first time I read such things about french driving exams and I can't remember having to answer inane questions like the car vs tank one.
Libertarians can't win for the simple reason that free markets tend towards oligopolies without a system to break them up and because "free markets" suspiciously never account for externalities.
Libertarians can't win for the simple reason they don't understand externalities and coordination problems, i.e. when everyone follows "free market" and what is good for them personally, the whole society fucks itself over very hard, because they can't escape tragedies of commons.
That's one of the reasons I think that those labels are idiotic and a form of secular religions - how about looking at how things actually work (and have worked out; we have plenty of past history to look at), instead of calling oneself a (e.g.) libertarian and saying "yay free market!" hoping that this particular idea is the silver bullet.
Libertarianism is a sliding scale. Many libertarians are ok with some government regulation and things like anti-monopoly laws. Others believe they aren't necessary and that most monopolies are created because government regulation rather than in spite of it.
I have never, heard any libertarian publication in the internet advocate for anti-monopoly laws. And the second position is fantasy, because every single economic theory (including those by Von Mises, Friedman and other "heroes" of libertarians) can describe the existence of natural monopolies quite well.
Doesn't take a genius to know that these extremist positions are the result of ignorance in the way money and power flow through society. Unfortunately, it's the sort of ignorance that reaches into the "not even wrong" territory.
There's no need to advocate for anti-monopoly laws because they already exist. They just don't spend time advocating against them.
Natural monopolies are a different issue (anti-trust laws can't affect a true natural monopoly because it's by definition impossible to break up.) Some libertarians dispute that they are an issue at all, more on that position here: https://mises.org/daily/5266/ Others believe the government should handle things like public utilities, just nothing else.
This is interesting, you're saying something along the lines of: If a rule can be written, there'll always be someone to write it, people to approve it, and libertarians will lose. I'd like that to Agile, which says you can't overregulate the software development process.
Here is my French driver's license horror story. I was an American expat living in Paris for 2 years. Fortunately, I had a Texas driver's license which is apparently one of a few states with reciprocal privileges, so all I had to do was exchange my Texas license for a French one, no class, no test. However, it took me 5 trips down to the French DMV, each time taking a number and waiting an hour. Each time, the clerk would find something else wrong with my application, even though my company had a French attorney assisting me, and I usually had a note from the previous clerk saying all I needed was one thing. Finally, all I needed was a copy of my Texas driving history. Texas does not provide a certified copy since you are able to download a copy from the website. Of course, France did not accept this. So, I wrote Texas DMV and asked them to mail me a certified copy. They sent me basically the same download. France did not accept it, but said the cover letter was certification enough, if I had it translated. Taking a number and an hour later at the US embassy, I had my translated document, which France finally accepted and issued my a license in exchange for my Texas license.
Then, 2 weeks later, I get a letter from the French DMV. They were not going to accept the letter and said I needed to come down and turn in the license they had issued me and bring in a properly certified driving record from Texas.
I gave up. I did not comply with this letter and kept the French driver's license. Fortunately, I was never pulled over and did not have any problems. When I left the country, I went back to exchange my French driver's license for my Texas one. I got a nasty scolding from the clerk, but I just played the dumb American and she eventually gave me my Texas license back.
I have to say, the absurd bureaucracy in France was not limited to the DMV, and I have more horror stories about the government regulations and bureaucracy there.
It reminded me of this[1] recent Tyler Cowen article that is basically arguing that France and other European countries will have long-term negative growth, mostly because they are over-regulated and hence cannot adapt to changes.
Growth for growth's sake is an irrational obsession. If people's standards of living are satisfactory, technology leads to reduced consumption without compromising standard of living, and individuals lead a good life, what more is there to it?
they still haven't discarded the requirement that everyone needs a job to have an acceptable standard of living, so lack of growth leading to unemployment is definitely a problem
In areas where regulations often don't make sense, people will simply stop observing them as well. This can undermine respect for the law in some cases. But in others you just end up with weird curiosities on the law books.
Disclaimer: I am from France and now, I am living in the U.S. since 2 years.
This article rings true. Driving in the U.S. is 100 times easier than back in France. The driving test is easy, if there is one! (I lived in Austin, Texas doesn't have anything OR at least doesn't have almost anything that looks like a driving test from a french perpective.)
I've spent something like 3,400 Euros to get my permit back in France, and I've waited maybe 9 months. It's true they are not giving away easily spots for the tests and it's also true that they try to get you doing as much as hours as possible.
Texas most certainly has a driving test (I know, I took it when I was 16 years old). If you gave the Department of Public Safety a France-issued license, Texas deemed you to already know how to drive so it did not require you to take the state test:
"Individuals who hold a valid, unexpired driver license from another U.S. state or U.S. territory, or from Canada, France, South Korea, Germany or Taiwan (the countries Texas has license reciprocity agreements with), do not have to take the knowledge or driving tests."
I guess this is true in many countries (no tests for french driving license holders). I'm french, and didn't have to take a paper test, or a driving test when I got my license in Japan. Which is kind of ridiculous considering they don't even check you know how rules differ between the countries, and there are more than a few differences, the most basic one being default speed limits in the absence of indication.
Anyways, I actually didn't get my french driving license before I was planning to move to Japan, and the reason I did get it is because getting a driving license in Japan is even more expensive than it is in France.
Fwiw, I got my french driving license on the first try after 23 hours of lessons and didn't have any of the problems mentioned. In fact, I had all my paper test preparation with a web site that my driving school was contracting, so besides the freelance instructors, I don't see much innovation in that ornikar thing.
I don't mean to turn this into an argument over the quality of Texas' driving test, just point out that I, too, hold a Texas license and it is my first license. The driving test consisted of approximately two hours of driving near my local DPS office. I had to go through different types of intersections, parallel park, merge onto the freeway, make legal U-turns, signal appropriately (which is to say, all of the time, and is a skill that apparently didn't stick with most of my fellow drivers), stop at the appropriate spot, and so on.
My original point was that if you gave the DPS clerk a French license, you didn't have to do any of that because Texas considers it a license transfer.
Less new drivers a year, selection of the best, many hours of practice, no easy passing, hell, this sounds like a dream!
They have half the rate of traffic accident as US or my country (Poland), so here's one obvious gain. I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure there - there seems to be an economic incentive to develop it.
I see the obvious injustices described in the article, but overall, this time it seems to have a positive effect. What the world needs is definitely not easier ways for people to get driving licenses.
> I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure
If you live near Paris(or a big city), you dont need a car.
If you live anywhere else you absolutely need a car! (or a motorbike, scooter ... ).
The infrastructure is good,but the train is extremly expensive today,(wasnt the case 10 years ago) and railways are crumbling.
Up unti recently you couldnt cross regions by bus in France,it was forbidden to preserve the train monopoly.Today people use ridesharing a lot,because taking the train is such a ripoff.
If you take your tickets in advance train is cheaper. Also it always seems so unnecessary to take the plane for such short distances (take the transport to the airport, check-in, walk to gate, wait, embark, wait, take-off, wait, landing, wait, find luggage, wait, take transport, you have arrived!)
I know right,it has become ridiculous. I'm happy the french people are "revolting" against it and are trying ridesharing. SNCF is just organized racket.
> If you live anywhere else you absolutely need a car!
Well, at least in Nantes, Lille, Lyon or Toulouse, you can live just fine without a car (and I have done so for years). I suppose it's the same in most cities with decent public transport. It makes holidays in the countryside complicated, though.
> Artificially making things hard for people is never positive.
As opposed to what? Letting free market and anarchy solve everything?
We already have tons of rules and mechanisms preventing people for killing themselves and others in numerous of idiotic ways. Do you advocate dropping them because they inconvenience people who really believe it's their privilege to dump toxic waste into river or put cancerogenic stuff into food because it's cheaper this way?
Cars are weapons. The only reason people don't respect it as such is a cultural mishap in a way cars were introduced into society.
I'm not talking about ideal world of counterfactuals and what-could-bes. I'm talking about the world we live in, where cars kills millions of people a year, while axes don't. So in real world, relaxing those "unfair" rules will cause death of many people. I'm all in favor of "clean, well defined and fair rules" - as long as they go in the direction of reducing traffic-related deaths, not the other way.
I believe the sentence you quoted actually has a lot of semantic meaning. Let's go counterfactual and imagine a world in which humanity stuck to trains and mass transit. If you went and told people of that world you want to give a car to everyone, they'd say you're nuts - general population can't be trusted with such a dangerous machine! But we don't live in this world, because cars were introduced gradually and we didn't notice the problems of "democratized transportation" until it was too late.
People have proven time and again that they are responsible enough to use axes. They have also proven time and again that they are not responsible enough to use cars.
> So in real world, relaxing those "unfair" rules will cause death of many people. I'm all in favor of "clean, well defined and fair rules" - as long as
"As long as" ? Really?
No, you don't get to limit yourself this way.
Either you are in favor of fair rules or you are not.
Sounds like you couldn't care less about fairness, you just want less driving. Your goal "less deaths" is laudable, your method "make people miserable" is not. Not only is it unfair, it's also infective.
And thus you have proven my claim against you: You do not care how much misery you cause, in your quest for your personal version of utopia.
> So in real world, relaxing those "unfair" rules will cause death of many people.
No, actually it doesn't. Compare death rate of France vs US. Basically identical. Yet one has stupid rules (only the rich can drive) one does not.
> they'd say you're nuts - general population can't be trusted with such a dangerous machine!
No, I would not say that at all. Can you name any useful tools are are restricted to professionals only in the US? The only restrictions are in commerce, you can't sell your services. But I can't think of a single one that is restricted for personal use. Not even explosives.
Some examples: Nail gun (explosive or air powered). Bench press. Milling lathe. Heavy machinery. Digging equipment. Chain saw. Fire. Knives. Slicing mandolin.
> People have proven time and again that they are responsible enough to use axes.
You suffer from recentisim. Back when axes were used routinely by everyone there were tons of deaths and injuries.
Every single tool ever can, and has, caused death and injury. Some tools are used by a lot of people, some by only a few.
You seem to want the world to be like a nursery - no one can use anything dangerous ever. There is nothing special about cars in this, they are just the thing you happened to notice.
> No, you don't get to limit yourself this way. Either you are in favor of fair rules or you are not.
I disagree. Let me rephrase my sentence. I'm in favor of clean, well defined and fair rules as long as they make sense and actually benefit the society. Rules can be well-defined and fair, and still be bad. For instance, let's look at the post 9/11 fluid limits in air travel. The rule is clear, well-defined (you can have max 100ml of fluid per container) and fair (you don't get to bring a 1L bottle on the same plane as everyone else who can't, just because you're rich) and still completely idiotic and harmful [0].
> You do not care how much misery you cause, in your quest for your personal version of utopia.
I do. I just happen to believe that millions of people dying (many of them due to no fault of their own) and resources being wasted on a terribly suboptimal way of transportation (especially in big cities) is more misery than those millions of people not dying and resources not being wasted.
> No, actually it doesn't. Compare death rate of France vs US. Basically identical. Yet one has stupid rules (only the rich can drive) one does not.
I read that as drivers in France are as bad as drivers in US, but because France has less of them, the rate of deaths per 100k people is less than half of the US.
> Some examples: Nail gun (explosive or air powered). Bench press. Milling lathe. Heavy machinery. Digging equipment. Chain saw. Fire. Knives. Slicing mandolin.
Well those are all tools that you use very rarely, in isolated environment and it is hard for them to hurt anyone else than their operator. Even so, people who use those tools very often (i.e. in a factory) have special security measures and training (or else their workshop gets shut down by EHS department).
Imagine if every other person were to use a nail gun for hours a day while working next to hundreds others. You couldn't possibly say that this wouldn't get regulated quickly, and if people were dying in accidents on a mass scale, the security wouldn't be improving until people would stop dying.
You say fire, explosives - but as far as I can tell, if you make anything more explosive than baking soda and water in a city, you'll quickly get arrested.
Basically, people are free to hurt themselves however they like, as long as they don't pose danger to others. That's the difference between an axe accident and a car accident.
> Every single tool ever can, and has, caused death and injury. Some tools are used by a lot of people, some by only a few.
Yes. And we care more about those that cause more injury than those that cause less injury.
> You seem to want the world to be like a nursery - no one can use anything dangerous ever. There is nothing special about cars in this, they are just the thing you happened to notice.
No, I just don't want to become a vegetable thanks to a random idiot who thinks speed limits are arbitrary numbers put in place to earn moeny for the police. And I don't like when people unnecessarily die (again, often due to no fault of their own) when they could not. I also pick on cars every now and then because drivers are making lives worse for us, people who live in big cities, and hell, we have some rights too.
[0] - annoys people, along with the rest of security theatre is responsible for deaths of many of those, who decided to travel by cars, and if the rule is to prevent someone from bringing significant amounts of liquid explosives, then why all bottles get thrown to the same container next to a line of 200 people?
I don't exactly see the wall of regulation. In France, as in Germany, you have to learn driving through an instructor, you can not do it in your parents car as it most likely lacks the necessary emergency controls for an actual licensed driver. Hence the cost, mostly paying for 20+ hrs of an instructors time.
There is only a limited amount of exam slots, and they are assigned based on previous pass rates, ensuring you don't waste it on unprepared students. That seems like a perfectly sane policy when there's only a low fixed amount of exam slots. In Germany, you pay a fee (to the government) for the exam, so its possible to add more tester.
There's definitely an in-between period where you want an instructor's car. In my case, Missouri, USA, I started with my father on our property, slow and maneuvering between trees (also teaching me how to use a manual transmission), then I did the usual, free (at least back in the late '70s), and not resource constrained driver's ed in high school, then I got a learner's permit and drove on the streets for some time with my father in the passenger side to get the level of experience we thought necessary (e.g. driving to high school each morning).
I don't want to throw away all regulations. If France has a good cheap internet and reasonable prices (compared to the US) and contracts terms for communications, it's thanks to heavy regulations. There are heavy regulations in consumer protections that I really miss in the US, where you never know what something will cost (taxes and tips are never on the sticker price), the contracts can be and routinely are leonine, and everybody is trying to rip you off all the time.
The exclusion of taxes on prices in the US is so infuriating and backwards. Having to manually calculate every price when you're in a store is just a pointless waste of effort. If you have to pay the tax it's part of the price so just regulate that that is the sticker price.
This is great news actually, hopefully with the economy in France becoming worse and worse they will finally be forced to change - it was possible to bail out Greece and to some extend Spain, but there is no way, shape or form where we actually bail out France, not even partially.
Deregulation and freeing the economy worked for Germany (they used to be considered the sick man of Europe) there is no reason it couldn't work for France.
Germany is really a special case: Around 1990 the first world western part merged with the second world eastern part, while giving all citizens of the eastern part around 2/3rd (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) of the western level of social benefits.
It's a little like if the U.S. would merge with Mexico and give all Mexicans huge social benefits.
So I would be careful with an analysis why the economy has improved exactly. After all the regulated economy had worked fine in the West until 1990.
When they do need to visit family in the more rural areas, they either take the train, or use a carpooling service (the most popular one is blablacar.com, which has been taking off like crazy in the recent years. The vast majority of French people I talk to when I go back home have heard of it- one of the few innovative French startups).
In France, I spent a year and half and about 1500 euros in driving lessons related stuff and didn't get my license. When I first moved to the US (southern state), it cost me something like 30 bucks and 30 minutes of my time. The test consisted of driving around the block, and parking the car (only snag: the inspector by my side, a rather overweight lady, told me that I'd lose points the further away I parked from the DMV's front door. I thought she was joking, but she wasn't).
The conservative French people say that more expensive, stricter, longer times for obtaining a driver license leads to safer roads; but if you compare US driving fatalities to French ones, there's not much of a difference- and people in the US drive way more than they do in France.
Like many other aspects of French culture, it's ridiculous how deeply legislated it is, and how the only ones benefitting from it are the ones making the rules. I find certain aspects of the US driving culture a little too much on the other extreme of the spectrum (learner's permit at 14? the driving test being just a drive around the block? the written test being a multiple choice questionnaire with the answers available on YouTube?), but France is worse by far, and it's hurting young professionals (my brother is without a college degree, and when he was unemployed he found that most jobs in rural areas require a car- but getting a license takes forever and is expensive. So that was a few months where he could do little but wait to get his driving license).