Chronicles of driving

I think I have mentioned before that before we moved to Berlin we thought we wouldn't get a car - public transit here is so extensive we thought it wouldn't be necessary. But early on when Dan mentioned this to the people at his office, they thought we were being ridiculous. The more people we talked to, the more we learned that most people who can afford a car have one. I do know one person without a car - one. So we gave in and bought a car, both to travel outside of Berlin in, and to have the option of driving in town.

We love our VW Touran, and I have posted pictures of filling it to the brim with recycling and Ikea purchases, and it has been indispensable for my strategy of buying used furniture.  I'm no longer afraid to drive it around town, even in traffic. I feel like I know the German rules pretty well, some of which are very different from driving in the U.S. Some of the complications are:

1. There is no right turn at a red light. 
2. The German road system is based on a complex system of priority; when more than one car is at a junction, the one that gets to go first is the one that has priority. Sometimes priority is established by a road sign, which can either signify priority along the entire road or only at the next intersection. Sometimes priority is established simply by the type of road you're on. Sometimes there is no clear priority and then the default rule is "right before left". This is particularly troublesome to American drivers, because it means that on a long straight road with crossroads coming in from the right, you need to stop and let drivers turn right onto the road in front of you, which is not something you would ever do in the States. If you fail to yield priority to another driver, they are likely to honk at the very least, or display a rude hand gesture, or at worst, insist on their priority and drive straight into you.
3. Many roads are narrow and have cars parked along both sides. Driving down these roads reminds me a little of a game of Frogger, darting right and left and squirting into an opening, then pausing and waiting for the next chance to advance.
4. There is a lot of bike traffic and pedestrian traffic. You can never make a right turn without looking back way over your right shoulder to make sure there isn't a bike continuing straight next to you.
5. Parallel parking is a must, and I have always been terrible at it due to lack of need to practice. I am becoming quite good at it, if I do say so myself. It helps tremendously that the Touran has a backup camera and it beeps progressively faster as you approach an obstacle. You really need this feature to squeeze into some of the super tight places that are the only available spaces to park.

I'm pretty sure I make mistakes daily in terms of how far to creep into an intersection or how exactly to adhere to the many proclamations made by signs up and down the road. Germany is often called a Schilderwald, "sign forest", meaning that it is heavily "treed" with signs posted ad nauseum up and down the streets. But for the most part I feel fairly safe as a driver. And so, of course, this is the time when Germany decides that I am unfit to drive. Yes, Germany allows you to drive for 6 months with a foreign driver's license and then it's no longer valid and you have to get a German license. So in their eyes I was fit to drive for those first 6 months when I didn't know what the heck I was doing, and now after 6 months of driving experience I'm no longer capable.

This wouldn't be a big deal if it was easy to get a German license. And it is, for some people. There are some countries with direct exchange programs - for example, you hand in your Australian driver's license and they give you a German one. There are some people who have that privilege no matter where they are from - embassy employees and their spouses get automatic licenses. But if you are from the United States, Germany deals with your driver's license on a state by state basis. The lucky folks from about half the states, including Alabama, Kentucky and Kansas, can swap their driver's licenses with full reciprocity. A second and much smaller group of states, including Connecticut, Oregon and North Carolina, has partial reciprocity, meaning they must pass only a written exam in order to get their German license. But unfortunately, Montana falls into the third group of states, for which there is no reciprocity at all. Drivers with a Montana license have to pass both a written and a practical driving exam before they can get a German license. Of course this makes no sense, since the requirements for getting a driver's license in the US are the same from state to state, and the states have full reciprocity with each other. Our best guess is that there is a pile of paperwork that needs to be done in order to attain reciprocity and some states simply haven't taken the time to complete it. I'm sure it's not on our state government's priority list, given the handful of Montana residents that live in Germany.

Next week will mark 6 months in Germany for us (wow!), so I will no longer be able to drive legally after next Thursday. I knew this deadline was looming but I just wasn't able to prioritize this enough to get it done in time so that I wouldn't have a lapse in my license. We actually started the process soon after our arrival, with our relocation specialist getting our licenses translated into German and requesting an appointment with the government bureau who determines the exact license requirements. The government appointment is needed because, for whatever reason, the rules I stated above don't necessarily seem to be set in stone. We kept asking our relocation agent back in the fall to explain the licensing process, and she kept telling us that we needed to wait until after our meeting to see what they said. The whole thing reminded me of the scene in LA Story where Steve Martin wants to eat at a super exclusive restaurant and he has to meet with the chef and Maitre D' and bring his financial statements. After interviewing him, they tell he can't have the duck on the menu, he can only have the chicken.

We waited about 2 months for our appointment with the government bureau, and during that time we had to complete the first 2 requirements for a license: an eye exam and a first aid course. We took care of these back in January. The first aid course was on the computer: German with English subtitles. The English translation was more like bullet points, because sometimes the German narrator would go on and on and on, and there would only be a sentence or two of English subtitles. It was two or three hours of information about first aid, what to do at the scene of an accident, etc. After the computer portion, there was a practical portion where we all had to take turns practicing pulling an unconscious person from a car, giving CPR, and stopping bleeding. This was in German but I managed to do what the others were doing and came away from the course with my first aid certificate.

Me at my first aid course terminal

Surprisingly the eye exam was the hardest part of the day. I was expecting an American-like eye exam, where you read the letters on the eye chart, but the German exam was much much harder. Instead of letters on the line, there were circles. Each circle had a small opening that could be in one of eight places: top, bottom, right, left, diagonal upper right, diagonal upper left, diagonal lower right and diagonal lower left. The openings were incredibly hard to see and often the whole circle was blurry and the opening seemed to shift from the top to the diagonal to the side depending on how long I looked at it. I literally had to stare at some of them for 30 seconds or more before I could even hazard a guess. If I were the test administrator I would have failed me because anyone who has to stare at something for that long would have been in a wreck long before they figured out the answer. But somehow she passed me. I got to look at the 2nd and 3rd line but when I compared my experience to Dan's, he had to look at the bottom lines! I couldn't see those at all.

I didn't realize until I was finding the sample chart below for this blog that this eye chart is called the Landolt C and it's used so the person being tested doesn't need to know the alphabet.

Way way harder than the alphabet eyechart!

When the date for our appointment with the government finally arrived, we showed up with our passports, all our registration documents, our Montana driver's licenses, the license translations, our eye exam results, our first aid course completion certificates, and our terrible non-smiling German ID photos (see below and right).

You're not allowed to smile in your German ID photo. It's
hard to not smile without looking angry!

The lady made copies of everything, filled out some paperwork, and then told us (through our relocation specialist) that they would send us a letter with their decision in 4-6 weeks. Karla argued with her that we needed to expedite the process because we needed our car for transporting children. She had to write out a statement in German to that effect that we both signed, and then we left the office to await the decision of the gods of the German licensing bureau.

Well, we didn't wait long. The expedite worked and the government must have processed our documents immediately, because the following week we received our letters in the mail, which provided the official details of our licensing requirements. As we expected, we were required to take both the theoretical and practical driving exams. But we weren't required to take the 20-40 hours of coursework that is required of Germans when they first get their driver's licenses, and is also apparently required of some Americans. I'm not sure if it's due to our ages or some other characteristic of ours or the cycle of the moon, but we escaped without that very expensive and time-consuming requirement.

So the next step was to study for the written test. We bought the "English" materials from a driving school in our neighborhood. I put English in quotes because we came to find out that the driving book is only in German. Well, apparently (I found out later when I tried to return the book to the driving school, thinking they had mistakenly given me the wrong book) you can get an English book but it costs about 95 Euros, vs. I think we paid 35 or 40 for this set. What we really bought, since the book was useless to us, was a login for the online website where all the test questions are. The website allows you to choose English as the language, but even after choosing English only some of the content is actually in English.

The curriculum for the driving test consists of 1000 study questions, which fortunately were available in English. Since we couldn't read the book, we couldn't study the material and then test ourself on the test questions. Instead we just had to go through the questions one by one and guess at the answers. You can check yourself as you go to see if you have answered the question correctly. If I answered the question wrong, or if I answered it right but I wanted to know more about the answer, I clicked on the help feature for that question. Click on help brings up some explanatory text, which was, of course, in German. I would copy the text and paste it into Google translate, which usually allowed me to understand the gist of the explanation.

Dan got to Germany 2 months before the rest of us, so his license expired a couple of months ago. Therefore, he was motivated to get his German license earlier than me, and he buckled down with his studies weeks before I started mine. Consequently, as of Monday he is the proud owner of a German license. He passed the theory and practical exams on his first try, which is quite impressive. I have heard that many people fail the theory multiple times. The test consists of 30 questions out of the 1000 that we studied. Each question is assigned a point value between 2 and 5. You are allowed to miss up to 9 points and still pass the test. So if you miss 2 questions valued at 5 points you fail, but if you miss 2 questions valued at 3 you will still pass. Questions consist of:

• videos: You watch a 15 second video from the perspective as if you were driving your car. After the video you answer a question about what was going to happen next, or what you are allowed to do at that point, what you need to watch out for, etc.
• picture questions: There is a picture of a situation and you are asked a question about it. For example: 

What should you anticipate in this situation?

What is the right course of action?

• environment questions: Various questions about tire pressure, emissions, how to shift gears for fuel economy, etc.
• technical questions: Questions about brakes, ignition, headlights, etc. My favorite question: "What must you know about catalytic converters?"
• numerical questions: So many numbers that need to be memorized. Useful numbers like default speed limits, marginally useful numbers like how many meters away from a St. Andrew's cross (railroad crossing) you are allowed to park, and then completely useless numbers like "Up to which permissible total mass may motor vehicles be parked on specially designated footpaths?" This category also encompasses word problems with formulas you are supposed to know, like stopping distance. E.g. "You are travelling at 50 km/h, have a reaction time of 1 second, and brake normally. What is the stopping distance according to the rule of thumb?" I wonder if anyone actually does this math in their head while they are driving to determine the correct following distance? The most ridiculous questions in this category are ones that relate to driving trucks, not cars. I have no idea why we need to know the answer to questions like this one: "A single-axle trailer has an actual gross weight of 600 kg. What is the minimum possible vertical load?" (By the way, the answer is 24 kg (4%), in case you wanted to know.)
• emotional questions: These are questions that deal with flashing your headlights at someone, driving when you're upset, competing with the teenager revving his engine beside you, etc.

As an aside, here is something so stereotypically German that it needs to be mentioned all on its own: there is something called the Central Register of Road Traffic Offenders. Your name goes here if you commit certain road violations. It sounds like something to be avoided at all costs! 

 

Yesterday I finished my first pass through the 1000 study questions, after many many hours of study over the last month. I had hoped to take the test today, but I'm not confident that I know everything. If you fail the test you can take it again but you have to wait 3 weeks. I don't want to set myself back three weeks - I would rather wait a few more days and go over all the questions I missed the first time around, make sure I have all the numbers memorized, and take some more practice tests before I try the real test. I think that is the right thing to do, because even though I missed 0 questions on 3 tests in a row today, I failed the fourth practice test I tried.

If I can pass the written test next week, the next step is to schedule 1 or 2 hours of driving with the driving school. Dan did 2 one-hour sessions. They drive you around near the places where the test will be held and make sure everything you do is by the book. If I can pass my written test early next week and take my lessons over the next 2 weeks, there's a chance I would only have to go without my license for about 10 days. I use public transit for most things because
1) It's good for the environment.
2) It frees me from the stress of driving.
3) I'm trying to make use of it because it's here. Where possible I am trying to do things differently than we do in the US, to experience a different way of life.
4) I feel a little less frenzied when I'm taking transit. It's a forced slow-down. Plus I can check email or Facebook or just close my eyes while I ride.
5) I don't have to worry about where to park.
But in general it takes about twice as long to get places with transit as it does with the car. So if we're on a tight schedule sometimes we have to take the car to make it someplace on time. Or sometimes it just seems like a waste of time to spend an hour on transit when I can drive there in 25 minutes. Or sometimes, like 2 days this week, there is a train strike and only the buses are running and they are packed and all running late and they are completely unreliable. So for those reasons I don't want to be long without my license. Hopefully I will be posting an update soon that I'm a licensed driver again!