Let the games begin... There's been some controversy about the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's training and iirc California fired them and went to another firm. I can see automobile training becoming a food fight too.
My brother brought up another point. Like many, he retired and bought a motor home. It wasn't a huge one, around 26'. Being a little more astute than many he realized the largest thing he'd ever driven was his wife's Buick 225 and had reservations about turning people loose with a passenger car license. I'd have to agree since bikes have been a separate endorsement for as long as I can remember.
Then there are the Montana doubles -- a pickup towing a trailer which has the boat hooked to it. I haven't personally seen one but I have to think somebody has managed to get an quad/sled trailer in the mix for a triple. Hell, that F350 has plenty of power.
In 1962 when I did mine our school had a deal with AAA. It was a professional driving instructor one on one but the bad news was the class was at 16:00 in down town DC. The first day I got caught in the flow and ended up at Arlington Cemetery before I could get turned around. The instructor was more freaked than me. He wasn't licensed in Virginia.
I was too young for driver ed in high school so my father taught me. After about a 4000 miles road trip and an expedition to NYC to check out my traffic skills, he pronounced me ready.
It was a three on the tree and the early stages were honing the ability to get underway without tipping over the longneck on the passenger side floor.
What really pissed him off was you got a slight insurance break from taking the official course with the gym teacher or whoever else they could rope into teaching driver ed.
Yes, the roads around the Pentagon and Arlington are like tangled spaghetti. For example, to go to Teddy Roosevelt Island, you have to be going the right direction on what, the GW Parkway maybe, and to get on that from the south is another challenge. **
57 years ago, in 1963, or when I was just 16, I think, the school gave drivers ed like Ralph described, during regular class hours all year long, but each kid only got ... I can't remember ... one day a week for
10 weeks, or every day for 2 or 3 weeks, for an hour, but only 20 minutes driving. On the school property, around the HS football field and the then unused land. (30 years later there were a lot of tennis courts, and maybe basketball etc. ) I can't remember what class we skipped to go to driver's ed. It couldn't have been after school because I dont' think I ever took the late school bus or was ever around the school after everyone went home.
Part of the Northwest Ordinance, iirc, was that when states were carved out of t he area north of the Ohio River, west of Pa. and east of the Mississippi, in each county in each township, one section of land had to given to the public schools. I guess that's where the high school was,
5 or 600 yards by 5 or 600 years, maybe. Even though most wasn't used at first.
The cars had automatic transmissions, might have had advertising from some dealer on the side. I only had trouble with two things. Letting the wheel spin back to straight on its own without my hands doing it. He had to correct me once or twice, but no more. And keeping in the right part of the lane. He said, Look there and let that line up with the boundary of the lane I was in. I thought he meant the right headlight, but he meant the hood ornament. Remember them? Once I got it straight which one he meant, that wasn't hard.
**I think to build a bigger building, they tore down the parking garage in Rosslyn, just north of there, where Woodward or maybe Bernstein met Deep Throat. They gave months of warning and I thought of going to see it but what was more interesting was knowning where it was. Right across the FSKey Bridge from Georgetown.
During the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, "Deep Throat" (W. Mark Felt) passed information to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in the middle of the night in an underground parking garage at 1401 Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn.[8] Wikip on Rosslyn
I lived in DC almost 40 years and I have never been there. I don't remember being on the TR bridge either. I guess I just never had a good reason to go to Crystal City or Rosslyn
The DMV fees here are about $50 a year for registering a car. What do you think they will be if the DMV starts teaching driving? And from what I see on the road, the problem does not appear to be lack of training, it's that the offenders just don't care and do as they please.
No, typically they are separate and just a small fraction of the stopping power. For example, the BMW X5 here the regular brakes are disc brakes on all 4 wheels. The parking brake uses shoes on the rear wheels only. And since those only get set and released, not pressed against moving metal, the drums rust up and reduce the stopping power too.
Not so much any more. I still have a lever in my Genesis but it is shift by wire. When I shut it off with the ignition button it will automatically go into Park. If I was using Auto Hold for the brakes it will also put on the emergency brake for parking.
It all depends on the car. The older US made ones usually just had a seperate cable ran to the rear drum breaks for the parking or emergency breaks. So if activated hard enough you get the same power as the normal foot break would have on the rear wheels.
Some of the newer cars that have disk brakes did have smaller drum breaks for tarking. Not sure how much actual breaking power they have. They are probably just made to hold the car on a hill when parked.
My SIL never uses his parking breaks and he had his car inspected where they activated the parking break. It locked up and the wheel had to be removed to unlock it.
It might not be now. I have not checked it out, but have seen some , think it was Fords, that have a round knob on the console that I do not see how it could be a direct link to the transmission.
Would be interisted to know if it is a linkage or some kind of electrical signal.
Other than making some money the only thing the DMV is good for in NC is to keep the near blind people off the road. Every so many years you have to go to the DMV office and take an eye test and if no violations no written test. It is also possiable to skip every other period of time just by sending in your money.
There is another agency that keeps up with issuing car titles and tags. They do try to make sure you have had the car inspected ( for what useless thing that is) , the county tax paid, and insurance. for just a renewal this can be handled by mail. Good thing as this year there are usually about 6 people in the local agancy. However 2 to 3 of them have been out on medical leave and the line is backed up out the door most of the time.
Here, it isnt just blind people. I have significant cataracts which any optician or ophthalmologist can see but which don't cause me a problem. I can read street signs, the small ones which tell you the name of the street, fine, but will likely fail the test next time.
In our case you can get 10 year licenses until you are over
70 or something but then only 5 year licenses. And then at 85 or something you have to have them check that you can actually drive safely every year.
Ours is every year and its not useless. They do check the tires and actually have a recording accelerometer in the car and take the car for a drive and record how well the brakes work. And check the lights and horn etc work. And that stuff like the battery is secure.
Here too but the check of the car is don't be a subset of garages that are authorised to do those checks and that obviously has to be done in person.
But another state only requires that on the sale of the car, not every year and there isnt any difference in the accident stats so its all a load of expensive bullshit.
Yeah, I always do mine online for that reason.
Cant do the license that way, they do a new photo every time and you cant do that separately like you can with passports.
I wont have to see till January.
I am tempted to see if the eye test is the usual fixed chart that I can just memorise. It's the same type of chart opticians use.
It all depends on where you go around here. On garage I went to regularry said he had cars in both bays and it was slightly raining. He filled out the paper work and gave me a new window sticker and a scraper and told me to scrape off the old one and put the new one on. That was before the computer hook up was standard.
Another was too much. They looked the car over and then told me it would not pass because it did not have the catalytic converter on it. I told him I bought the car new and it had better have whatever it needed as nothing in the exhaust system had been changed. Another man there told him on my car it was under the hood.
Here they do not have a regular eye chart on the wall. There is a box on the desk and it shows signs and other things so would be difficult to memorize as you would have to get access to that machine.
When I lived in PA the inspection was a joke. Some shops would rip off people for unneeded work, others did a half assed inspection. I found a shop that did check lights and put his foot on the brakes while scraping off the old sticker. I went there for years until he finally closed.
States with no inspections have been found to have no higher rates of accidents or injuries. Waste of money.
Ralph Mowery snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net wrote
That's why our system uses licensed recording accelerometers in the car being tested. The print out slip is stapled to their copy of the paperwork so they cant just say that the brakes are fine and not bother to measure them.
Sure, in theory they can just put the meter in a known good car instead and test that car, but that's risky with those who hand around while the car is tested like I do who can report them for faking the test like that.
I've never had anything like that. I did have one who wouldn't sign off on the car because there was an empty dash slot for a radio. In those days you could just go to another tester. Nowadays you cant, once they fail something, you cant get another test, the first tester has to sign off on it after the fault is fixed.
Yeah, in the UK they just get you to read a car number plate at a specified distance.
Yeah, ours is a fancy backlit screen for the eye chart so it is certainly possible to have the letters varying. I will have to have a prowl around with an invisible body cam and see if the chart does vary. I have 6 months to check how their system works.
At least Florida is honest about the license, tag and title business. You do it at the Tax Collector. They used to have a separate driver license bureau but last time I did that at the Tax Collector too.
In 1956, my best friend's parents had a DeSoto with automatic transmission and push button shifting. The buttons were on the dash to the left of the steering wheel. I guess they were still mechanically connected.
Oour '52 Hudson had the reverse, my brother told me. That when one pressed the regular brake pedal, it applied the brakes both hydraulically and mechanically. In case t he brake line broke and the fluid went out.
It also had a parking brake of course.
AFAIK not counting this, there were no dual brakes until after '67, at least 15 years later, when they separated front and rear brakes.
If there were no Federal law requiring safety measures, we wouldn't have many.
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