Driving Excitement
The rules of the road, and the road ahead
The biggest news this week for me, personally, is that I’ve gotten my driver’s license here in Qatar.
This may not sound like an accomplishment. It both is and it isn’t. It isn’t, in the sense that I’m so old that having a license is just something I should have—you shouldn’t celebrate my license any more than I celebrate birthdays. Both are fun when you’re 16, but by now both are just more symbols of responsibility.
It is, in the sense that getting to this point has taken literally months of work. First, I had to get an appointment at a driving school, where I had an eye exam (fun middle-aged news: my previously 20/10 vision is now … not that) and a slightly baffling series of encounters with bureaucrats of various stripes that all ended with me exchanging hundreds of riyals for pieces of paper or, at one point, an app.
The app, it turned out, was the test prep for the written exam. The information was familiar, even useful in explaining rules and signs—something I’d known intuitively but had never actually understood is that the United States is an outlier in road signage, having refused to sign on to the treaty governing road signs that pretty much the rest of the world uses.
(Incidentally, most of the discussion I skimmed about the US decision not to sign the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic framed this as a wacky, reactionary US decision, but other non-signatories include Japan, India, China, Canada, and Australia.)
The biggest step forward then was that I had to take—and pass—five tests per day on the app for five days, which qualified me to take a written (computerized) test back at the driving school. The computerized test was available in something like 20 languages—Arabic and English, of course, but also a whole host of South Asian and European languages, plus a few others (Japanese? I think?)—they wouldn’t let me take a photo of the logon screen in a room full of testing equipment for a licensing exam. Not even for a Substack!
The test itself was … fine? This was, I believe, my third written driving test, and most rules aren’t that dissimilar. It also helped that the questions on the exam were directly taken from the practice exams and that the typical question was something like:
When you are driving a car, and begin to feel sleepy, you should:
Drive faster
Drink some alcohol to calm your nerves
Drive faster while drinking alcohol
Pull over and rest
The bigger challenge was the road test. This was mostly a big challenge because, at the moment, appointments are booked something like eight to ten weeks out, and, as everyone stressed to me, most people fail their first exam.
A fun side note here is that I haven’t been able to drive this whole time because of my visa, which means I couldn’t use my international driver’s permit yada yada yada the first time I drove in four months was in a high-stakes test at 7 am in a foreign country where I’d never driven after a 6 am muster that meant I woke up at 4:30 am to arrive on time.
Not optimal!
I’ve given away the drama—I passed—but the real punchline was how anticlimactic the test was. I was the first person of the four test-takers in the car (a Camry) to drive—something that I’m told was awful because the first person always fails—and I couldn’t disengage the handbrake, which was stuck. The traffic inspector, wearing a very severe uniform, had to disengage it. Fun! Good omens piling up!
I gamely drove out of the parking lot, took a right turn, and drove to a red traffic light, where not only did I stop but I left enough room for even the most distracted driving instructor to note that I had left room—let’s say five, or perhaps ten, meters. After the light turned green, I drove through the intersection, inadvertently extra-obeying the speed limit because frankly I’m used to driving Priuses that had substantially more pickup than the overloaded li’l Camry.
A minute later, the inspector told me to pull over. We were now perhaps two blocks from where we’d begun. In the United States, this would be an unambiguous statement of failure. I pulled over, forgetting to put on the parking brake because I’m an American, and we all shuffled seats—yes, there’s a very politically incorrect name for everyone getting out of a car and getting back in different seats—and I slunk into the back seat.
I felt a little better, but only a little, when the other three drivers also got to drive for about four minutes each (each time occasioning a reshuffling—I don’t recommend being in the middle seat of the back seat of a Camry). But maybe this was the first time for everyone! Maybe we were all going to fail.
After everyone had driven, the inspector went into the small official license station to fill in paperwork, and we went back to the large outdoor tent where we’d begun to await the results.
Ah, did I mention that all of this begins and ends in a tent? A large tent, one that could semi-comfortably seat 60. This is one of those details that sounds incredibly exotic or Orientalist, but around these parts tents are just the equivalent of a pole barn—a utility building where you can put things out of the sun and wind. (Rain is less of a concern.)
So, yes, there was a tent, but the results come to you via a large, flatscreen TV (do we even need to specify flatscreen? it’s 2024! they’re all flatscreens!) that shows everyone’s name and result as they come in and via a text from the Metrash service. Metrash is Qatar’s e-government portal/database/app/everything—you know, the sort of app that lets you pay parking tickets and file your immigration paperwork and register your phone number or sometimes even vote in elections (if you’re a citizen). It’s the sort of convenience that reminds you that the United States is such an old and complicated government that it will basically never be able to fully adapt to the Internet age.
I waited. And waited. And waited.
A lot of names flashed green. Some turned red. I practiced manifesting, picturing my name in green.
Of course, finally it did (although after I got the text saying I’d passed). From there, I walked over to the official branch and a civil servant (in full niqab), took my ID and debit card. Five minutes later, she called my name and I had a Qatari driver’s license.
Three hours later, I’d rented a car. It’s a big car. We’ll talk about that later.
There’s a lot in that story. For one, if you’re paying attention, the Qatari government does a lot of its work through private vendors. For another, the Qatari government is well aware that its society is cosmopolitan—18 languages is a lot to translate exams into, as well as all of the accompanying prep materials. For yet another, female civil servants do work that involves interacting with a largely male audience—that’s not surprising when you’re on the ground here for more than, like, 45 minutes, but it is something that I find that people who haven’t been to the region are surprised by. And for a fourth point, e-government is so established here that the app we all use for it seems like it’s from a generation or two ago—like it’s going to ask you for a MySpace profile.
But there’s also some points that are interesting because of what’s not in the story. The most important one for me personally is that American driver’s licenses don’t automatically convert—British ones do!—and so I was in the same process as a whole host of others, including people specifically hired to be drivers for firms here. Passport privilege is real, but it’s also a little arbitrary. (I didn’t have to take a parking test, for one.)
Another is the lack of time slots. It takes time to deal with any traffic bureau—ask the typical American how much they love going to the DMV—but there’s likely some element of rationing going on in the system; either the bureaucracy is capacity-constrained (possible) or there’s a set of factors interacting to limit the throughput of new drivers in the system (also possible). Boy, though, there’s nothing quite like the prospect of another three or four months of Ubering everywhere to concentrate the mind on observing stopping distances.
Then there’s the absence of friction once you’re in the system. I’ve transferred licenses between jurisdictions a lot in the United States and I’ve had a lot of temporary paper driver’s licenses waiting for the relevant agency to mail me a new card. Here, they just … printed a license for me. It took about as long as it does to get a new university ID card. Part of the difference is surely in anti-counterfeiting technology, but having a master registry of all licenses and IDs issued so that the relevant authorities can just check if an ID is valid is … well, it’s a lot easier to administer.
Most of all, there was no apparent favoritism. Maybe I got my license on my first try because I’m an American. (It’s very hard to hide. When I put on a ball cap, I look like an editorial cartoonist’s caricature of a Trump voter. Also, my application says NATIONALITY: USA.) But the Indian, Kenyan, and … possibly Lebanese? … guy in the car with me also got their license, and I don’t know of any privilege ranking where we’d all be right next to each other.
All in all, this isn’t quite what the stereotypical Middle Eastern bureaucracy is supposed to be, right? It was, excepting the wait time between appointments, no less smooth, and frequently much more smooth, than any interaction I’ve had with an American traffic bureaucracy. (I’d rather do this than go through the California process again.)
I do wonder what the process is like in other countries, especially beyond the Gulf. (I could name some suspects I think would be less rapid, but because some countries are tetchy about how they’re described on social media, and because I’d like to see the pyramids, I will refrain from listing them.)
That said, I also wonder how any of this would play if I were to say it to average Americans. My guess is that, compared to ten or fifteen years ago, people would be somewhat more open to the idea that other countries could teach America a thing or two about running a bureaucracy. I also suspect that if I said that it was a Middle Eastern country, I’d get a lot more pushback! Yet my experience has been that a lot of governments work a lot more smoothly than the U.S. does—that the unspoken baseline expectation that the U.S. defines world class is sometimes, but not universally, accurate. And I often think that the belief that anything the U.S. does is world class constitutes a pervasive mental barrier toward checking what the state of the world is.
All of this is to say that for the next couple of weeks, you’ll see more content than normal about
cars
driving
in this newsletter than normal. It all has a point, trust me. I regret to inform you that Tom Friedman has not been wrong—talking with drivers in a foreign country and paying attention to the rules of the road really does tell you a lot about the way the world works. I’ll talk about other material, too! I do, however, think there’s about three or four posts here about what I’ve learned driving and watching the roads.
Just to repeat something I wrote in the previous newsletter about a set of changes I’ve made to the paid tiers for this here publication.
I’ve been reluctant to have paywalled content because as a scholar, especially at a public institution, I’ve felt a responsibility to share my knowledge with the world. However, there are topics and themes that don’t fit into my areas of expertise, and those are the ones that I’ll be writing about weekly(ish) and paywalling for paying subscribers only. I realize that’s kind of a weird pitch, but I don’t want to be in a position where I’m gatekeeping knowledge, but I’d also like to have a way to support my Macbook habit.
So here’s the “rewards” for going to paid. Paying subscribers will also be able to participate in polls to determine what I’ll write about. Polls will run monthly-ish and will definitely inform my editorial judgment.
As always, paying subscribers will be the only ones allowed to comment on every post.
Finally, those of you who pay for the highest membership tier (renamed “Medici”) will be able to commission a post—a full-length essay that will run here. I don’t expect many takers but, hey, if that’s you, let’s talk!
I’ve been gratified—okay, actually, embarrassed—that several of you converted after last weekend’s newsletter, including several new Medici members! I will be in touch with all paid subscribers soon(ish) about next steps.