Thailand is making driving licenses more difficult to acquire: For foreigners

I have a Thai motorbike license that I acquired while living here. It was absurdly easy to acquire as far as the tests were concerned. Much like with most things in this country or I suppose with any other one that was difficult though was the absolutely mountain of paperwork that you had to navigate in order to get the license. The crazy amount of time between submission and issuance of the actual license was just nuts considering that we all know an ID can be printed immediately on the spot in someone's living room, let alone with the vast resources of an entire government behind you.

The written test was a joke. The questions were absurd and sometimes didn't make sense (in English) and the road test consisted of an instructor standing in the shade under and umbrella mostly smoking a cigarette while you navigated a really silly and stupidly easy track on a motorbike that you brought with you.

That last part really gets me because unless someone drove you there, you would need to dive the motorbike to the testing place, illegally, in order to do the road test for the license. Seems a bit backwards doesn't it?

src

I hope this is an AI pic. No helmet, nationalities are reversed, kickstand is down, nobody is smoking. Doesn't seem real.

Basically, the training and testing system that is in place to determine whether or not you are deserving of having a license is child's play and the fact that even if you did somehow manage to fail that you can take the test an infinite amount of times until you pass makes it even more pointless.

I think this pointlessness and the fact that someone, somewhere in the government realized that this "testing" is a joke compared to how rigorous the training and licensing programs are in many / most western countries and therefore made a rule that if you have a foreign license, you don't need to take the written test (which doesn't make sense) or the road test (which is absurdly easy.)

But as is often the case in this and any other country, some sort of blemish on their record as far as safety is concerned well, the blame has to be placed somewhere and what better place to point than towards a group of people that cannot point back.

Now some politician wants to re-instate the requirement for foreigners to sit the written and road test because: reasons. The things they state are political and obvious: "to increase road safety" but if you spend just a few weeks in Thailand you will notice very quickly that "road" and "safety" are not two words that belong near one another in Thailand unless there is a "non" or "not" along with them.

The roads here are chaos. There is zero enforcement of any sort of laws. People routinely drive on the wrong side of the road on purpose because it is faster and over time, I became one of them. Outside of certain days of the month where they need to collect police "tea money" there is virtually no enforcement of helmet laws and you can tell this is the case by going almost anywhere other than Bangkok and looking at the situations with people's heads on their bikes.

Cars are more of the same although the officials would claim otherwise. I have been in a car with Thai drivers that were terrifying experiences. These folks appeared to have little to no knowledge of how the car even works and seemed to have some sort of religious opposition to wearing a seatbelt. This is despite the fact that everyone knows (including Thai people) that Thailand has some of the most dangerous roads of any country in the world.

But yeah, it's the foreigners that need to have more stringent regulations put on them. of course it is.

A lot of my news ends up being specific to foreigners because that is what the English news focuses on but in this case there appears to be zero mention of any sort of changes as far as road enforcement of any sort of laws is concerned and that honestly, is what they really should focus on if they were genuinely concerned about the claimed "road safety."

I have a buddy that has an expired international license that he has used for a decade here and any time there is a roadblock he just wraps the license in a couple 100 Baht notes and off he goes. Maybe they will change that too? Severely punishing officers for seeking or taking bribes might be a good place to start also.

So I guess the next time I renew my license I am going to have to bring every single piece of paper that I have in my house and plan on taking two days off of work so that I can take their ridiculous test. Of course, just like any time something like this happens there will emerge some people that you can just pay money to and they will check that yes, you did sit for the tests and passed with flying colors!.

Maybe this was the real objective all along