I finally went and got a California motorcycle licence. I had heard that the test was easy, but compared to what I had to do to get my licence in Ontario, it was just silly.
It was held entirely in a parking lot – there was no street driving portion. There were no speed related tests – no braking, no swerving, no cornering at speed. The whole test consisted of driving around a tiny course painted in an area of the DMV parking lot. You have to drive around it twice, once with a slalom around some cones, and once with a couple of straight portions instead. There were no points, just pass or fail. If you drove outside the lines, hit a cone or put your foot on the pavement, you failed. That was it. Crazy.
Also, while I was waiting to get plates issued for my bike, I saw a Chinese lady waiting to take the written test. She was holding what looked like some pages ripped out of a phone book – they even had some English at the top of the page that said something like “Chinese language yellow pages”. The rest of content on the pages was a copy of the DMV multiple choice tests in Chinese, with the answers marked in. What I’m wondering is if this is just an attempt to disguise these study materials, or if there actually is a section in some legitimate phone book that contains these pages…
