Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
^ Having such a cavalier attitude toward getting one's license is so foreign to me. It was a huge deal for us when we were in high school that we get our driver's licenses as soon as goddamned possible. Manitoba allowed you to get a learner's permit at 16, unless you were enrolled in an accredited driver's ed program through your school, which would drop the age requirement to within six months leading up to your 16th birthday. (I know AB allows it even earlier, age 14.)
People who otherwise wouldn't piss on each other if the other were on fire would relay experiences with the road test, strategies for the parallel parking test, 'gotchas' where they failed, etc. It became a massive unifying thing we all wanted to accomplish... almost more important than graduation, and had no correlation to whether someone knew or gave a crap about cars as a hobby or otherwise. A driver's license was a step toward freedom, and autonomy, and adulthood.
For someone in this country to be a fully-fledged adult and not have a driver's license (exempting for extenuating circumstances, of course) is just weird and comes off -- to me, at least -- as someone who doesn't really have their sh-t together. You don't have to plan to buy or own a car, but to not be able to at least operate one in this world should the need ever arise is just not being prepared IMO.
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We didn't have transit in Canmore at the time, so if you wanted to go anywhere it was walk, bike, or mom and dad driving you there(rare!). Pretty much everyone got their license, because it meant freedom to go to Banff, skiing, Calgary, shuttling bike downhill runs up the Spray...it would have been depressing not having that.
So maybe it's a city thing, but I still can't imagine planning an entire life without a license, so you may as well get it young. And our parents treated the same as swimming lessons and going to school, it was something you really should have.