Halifax Drivers Test Route
Halifax Drivers Test Route 4,0/5 4569 votes
TL/DR not important enough considering the overall effort spent on driver's education and testing
First, the United States has infamously easy driving school standards compared to most developed countries especially European ones - it's a totally different teaching and driving culture. California is no exception - I only had to take an online course and go through 6 hours of real-life lessons, and if you wait two years until 17.5 to get a permit, you can do away with the real-life lessons and rely on your parents. In Germany, lessons and classes can easily exceed €1000.
So when you don't have much time or resources to teach driving, you focus on the basics. Having bad parallel parking abilities is a smaller safety issue than having bad lane-changing or turn-making abilities. It's mostly following a series of steps and alignments, but a newbie driver unaccustomed to maneuvering a car at all, and especially in tight spaces, it can easily take a lot of effort and time.
Given the 20-25 minute long driving test and 6 hours of required classes, that's time not spent covering following distances, judging left turns, and any number of high-risk, high-speed maneuvers. I vaguely remember my instructor saying I should just learn parking on my own / with parents. In the written test, which is around 45 questions, A B C multiple choice, a good answerable parallel parking question is going to be hard to ask especially one that matches the difficulty of everything else.
As for California specifically and not other states (since many states do test parallel parking): It's probably a combination of history and economy. We are perpetually low on public service money, and when you're getting furloughed every other Friday, DMV resources are even more strained without setting up a specific parallel parking area on their cramped grounds. The CA test doesn't even ask you go to on the freeway depending on route, perhaps we're just lax. Some quick Googling tells me Oregon does not while Washington state, Idaho, and Nevada do, so it isn't a pure regional thing. Maybe someone can make a map. An article on the DC DMV stopping testing of parallel parking (maybe they got lazy): http://washingtonexaminer.com/ar...
Finally, parallel parking doesn't feel very important when you have free parking lots in every suburban mall or even downtowns in Palo Alto and Mountain View. The only place I've driven in California that requires extensive parallel parking is San Francisco, everywhere else parallel parking happens <10% of the time, and if you really don't want to do it there's a lot somewhere for you.
First, the United States has infamously easy driving school standards compared to most developed countries especially European ones - it's a totally different teaching and driving culture. California is no exception - I only had to take an online course and go through 6 hours of real-life lessons, and if you wait two years until 17.5 to get a permit, you can do away with the real-life lessons and rely on your parents. In Germany, lessons and classes can easily exceed €1000.
So when you don't have much time or resources to teach driving, you focus on the basics. Having bad parallel parking abilities is a smaller safety issue than having bad lane-changing or turn-making abilities. It's mostly following a series of steps and alignments, but a newbie driver unaccustomed to maneuvering a car at all, and especially in tight spaces, it can easily take a lot of effort and time.
Given the 20-25 minute long driving test and 6 hours of required classes, that's time not spent covering following distances, judging left turns, and any number of high-risk, high-speed maneuvers. I vaguely remember my instructor saying I should just learn parking on my own / with parents. In the written test, which is around 45 questions, A B C multiple choice, a good answerable parallel parking question is going to be hard to ask especially one that matches the difficulty of everything else.
As for California specifically and not other states (since many states do test parallel parking): It's probably a combination of history and economy. We are perpetually low on public service money, and when you're getting furloughed every other Friday, DMV resources are even more strained without setting up a specific parallel parking area on their cramped grounds. The CA test doesn't even ask you go to on the freeway depending on route, perhaps we're just lax. Some quick Googling tells me Oregon does not while Washington state, Idaho, and Nevada do, so it isn't a pure regional thing. Maybe someone can make a map. An article on the DC DMV stopping testing of parallel parking (maybe they got lazy): http://washingtonexaminer.com/ar...
Finally, parallel parking doesn't feel very important when you have free parking lots in every suburban mall or even downtowns in Palo Alto and Mountain View. The only place I've driven in California that requires extensive parallel parking is San Francisco, everywhere else parallel parking happens <10% of the time, and if you really don't want to do it there's a lot somewhere for you.