Why is it so expensive? Is there required courses? I can understand that in cities, a DL might not be a huge deal but I can't imagine that rural France would be happy with that.
But once you have the license you can drive on highways without speed limits, where safety and following rules is important (while the free ride is a bit of a myth - many segments have speed limits, there is lots of traffic limiting speed and in case of an accident insurance restrict payment when going fast)
Really? Now I realise why some Americans looked so confused and dismayed when I was living there without having ever learned to drive.
So there's nobody from USA who chooses to have an education, and not to drive a car?
Given that most students do get a drivers license, it wouldn't be surprising if Drivers Ed were a mandatory part of some high school curricula. Note that this is probably just the theory part in most cases and doesn't include actual on the road instruction. (Which is typically done by parents or by a company--the latter again in part for insurance price reasons.)
HS graduation requirements vary (in some cases, much more than you would think) between districts. Usually, each town/city has its own district -- in rural areas a district may span many towns, in more urban areas, you may have more than one district in a single city. There are state guidelines, but we also have 50 different states. Federal guidelines are pretty sparse, and often only enforced by accepting funding -- don't take their money and you don't have to play by their rules.
I suspect that there is no blanket statement about the US public school system that will hold true nationwide (except, perhaps "it could be better" or "it makes no sense").
The reaction to not having a license is probably simply due to 60+ years of "The American Dream" for a kid was having their own car and the freedom^tm that came with it, and the simple fact that in the majority of the country, public transportation is crap, and our cities are not designed around walking. So a car, and license, is pretty much a requirement.
A lot of people would argue this is very good policy.
First article I found from 2018, citing numbers from 2017, says 37% fail theory, 28% during practical test, which is quite a lot, considering that you have extra training lessons and instructors should know what's being tested (conspiracy theory would be: failed test leads to more lessons and more fees) https://m.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/knapp-37-pro...
With my birthday being in July, I technically should have had to take a Drivers Ed course, but because I moved my senior year of high school, I basically got a lot of free credits because the state requirements were different and I would have had to essentially take an extra year of HS if they didn't just hand me credits. It's weird.
Traffic fatalities per billion miles driven:
Belgium - 7.3 United States - 7.3 Slovenia - 7.0 Japan - 6.4 France - 5.8 Finland - 5.1 Canada - 5.1 [similar requirements as US for license] Germany - 4.2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
From your link: Belgium=7.3, France=5.8, USA=7.3 versus Germany=4.2, Netherlands=4.7. I don't know what the P-value on that is (I never thought of looking at this until you mentioned it) but so far it looks like the data matches intuition.
Of course, there's a lot more factors, like that in the USA and Germany have towns much further apart than the Netherlands (I've said before that in NL you're never more than a few minutes away from being at least in hearing distance of the nearest human). This makes public transport much worse and those who don't like driving may be obliged to, but also the infrastructure costs more when there are fewer inhabitants per km² to make use of each road which should make the infrastructure worse. Indeed, driving from NL into Germany during rain, the highways instantly and universally turn from nearly dry (due to permeable concrete) to lots of spatting and aquaplaning risk.
I'm also not sure fatalities is the only thing we should be looking at. NL is higher than Germany but if you have more city traffic than highway traffic, you probably hit more bicycles and pedestrians despite better infrastructure.
Nevertheless, interesting statistic.
They've since changed it to 16 with 50 hours of supervised driving.
You can get a limited ”hardship” license to go to school or work at 14.
Regarding 50-60 hours of instruction, that’s enough for a private pilots license and airplanes are vastly more complicated than driving.
Despite the nil enforcement, they strictly follow red lights. I'm surprised it's not more lawless. In N. America I ask people "What do the police do?" and locals answer "speeding tickets". In France, I never get a clear answer.
While "It isn’t because French drivers are better." may be true for safety, I do find their drivers far more predictable than N. American drivers on highways.
They'll stay in the right on the highway, unless passing. And when they finish passing, they'll go back to the right. With signals.
At least in S. Ontario, drivers pick a lane randomly, and stick to it for ??? reasons. Signalling after its clear what their intentions are (ie: not a "signal" at all). Not uncommon to see drivers on an merge onto an open highway, and immediately start multiple lane shifts with nothing to pass for miles ahead.
It took a while for my French handlers to get me to stop angling my wheel while parked because of the bumper cars you mentioned.
One thing I've noticed about the US is pulling over for emergency vehicles. Cars will pull over quickly and stay over. In Canada people will barely pull over, take their time, coast a bit.
This course is on a race track and you will learn how to deal with aquaplaning and controlled avoidance of obstacles amongst other things. They also force the car to lose control so that you can experience that (I believe you drive over a metal sheet that moves, causing the back to spin out).
Not quite snow/ice training but it gives you some experience in how to deal with situations where you lose control of your car.