Last Thanksgiving break, a few of my friends and I visited Acadia National Park in Maine. We planned meticulously for the trip – booking the Airbnb months in advance, creating an itinerary of trails to hike, and even planning each meal down to the ingredient – until one big question remained: Who would do the grueling five-hour drive from Boston to Maine?

Everyone was understandably reluctant to drive, so I volunteered. After all, I’ve had my South African driver’s license for three years and was no stranger to driving long distances back home. Immediately, however, my friends objected.

“Don’t people drive on the left side of the street in South Africa?”

“Andi, this is Boston traffic we’re talking about. Aren’t you the least bit terrified?”

“Is it even legal for you to drive here?”

My friends were right about the first two things, but I assured them I’d practice before the trip and drive extra carefully (and slowly) while we were still in Boston. To their third objection, I smugly pointed out that Massachusetts (like most US states) allows driving with a foreign license printed in English.

“Yeah, but what about the states that don’t?”

To my dismay, a Google search revealed that Maine only allows driving with a foreign license only if I’ve been in the country for less than a month. But I wasn’t about to let anything get in the way of my Acadia trip.

“What if… I just got a US driver’s license?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

For the last three years, I’d always put off getting a US license for several reasons, such as:

• I was too busy with classes to spend a day at the RMV⁠01 Short for “Registry of Motor Vehicles”, which is what they call the DMV in Massachusetts. Fun fact: In Maine, it’s called the “BMV”, short for “Bureau of Motor Vehicles”. dealing with the paperwork.
• Massachusetts requires you to use a friend’s car and have the friend sit in the back seat during your road test.
• Driving in Boston is terrifying.

But this year, I finally ran out of excuses, and this Thanksgiving trip was the catalyst I needed to get started on the process. My fall semester classes perfectly aligned such that I had a permanent 5-day weekend, and I realized I could pay a driving school to use their car for the road test. A US license (with REAL ID) also comes with many perks, like being able to travel between states without having to carry my passport and risk losing it. I was going to live in New York City after graduation too; as terrifying as driving in Boston is, I felt that doing my road test in Manhattan would be much worse.

With that, I hatched up my ingenious three-step plan:

1. Go to the RMV
2. ???
3. Profit

Foolproof if you ask me.

The Learner’s Permit

Unfortunately, nothing involving the RMV is ever that simple. Despite having three years of driving experience, I still needed to get a learner’s permit before doing my road test.

No worries though – I knew how to drive and what all the street signs meant (even though they’re different from the rest of the world for some reason), and after reading through the Massachusetts Driver’s Manual, I could ace all the online mock tests I took. Plus, I was allowed to get a generous seven of the 25 questions wrong and still pass.

With the confidence of a Bostonian driver running a red light, I marched into the exam room, expecting to breeze through the test. However, I quickly learned that the online mock tests I used had left out a rather big portion of the actual test: laws about the Junior Operator Licence (the license you get if you’re under 18). I only briefly skimmed the JOL part of the driver’s manual because none of those laws apply to me anymore so I assumed the test would have at most two questions about it, but my test had at least five. And of course, I got all of those questions wrong.

In the end, I barely scraped by with just enough correct answers to pass. But a pass is a pass! The Thanksgiving trip was only a week away at this point, so it was too late for me to do the road test and get the proper license. Still, I could finally drive to Maine (as long as someone with a valid license accompanied me)!

The Road Test

Despite having a shiny new learner’s permit in hand, I didn’t end up driving to Maine. One of my friends, an EMT who drives the MIT ambulance, joined the trip and volunteered to drive instead. (Probably for the better, because she’s very good at driving – much better than me.) I still got in some good driving practice in Boston and parallel parking practice in Maine, so I scheduled my road test after returning from the trip.

As you can probably tell by the timing of this post though, I did not blow away the examiner with my impeccable driving skills. In fact, the test went so poorly that I didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. It was kind of embarrassing, especially given that the South African road test is objectively way harder (e.g., we have to do it in a manual transmission car) and I was able to pass that test as a teenager.

The Driving Lessons

Anyway, I took that first road test as a sign that I needed much more practice, so I signed up for a few driving lessons before retaking the road test. Honestly, I really needed those lessons. If driving in Johannesburg is middle school, then driving in Boston is MIT. The roads here are so much more chaotic, and there are so many more hazards that I never had to deal with back home.

Firstly, there’s the weather. The temperature almost always stays above freezing in Johannesburg, and winters there are dry, so the roads are never icy there. In contrast, Boston was covered in black ice this morning because it rained last night.

Next, there are pedestrians. Johannesburg is a very car-centric city with a surprising lack of sidewalks, so there are few pedestrians and even fewer jaywalkers. In contrast, pedestrians and jaywalkers are everywhere in Boston. One time, someone walking her dog even saw me slowly rolling down the street and decided to run onto the street in front of me.

Finally, there’s Boston’s awful road system. People complain a lot about Boston drivers being dangerous, but after driving around Boston for a week, I can say it’s less a driver skill issue than an issue of the roads being near impossible to navigate. Not only are many of them missing road markings (so it’s hard to tell where you’re meant to go), but their layouts and designs are confusing and often misleading. Several times, the lane I was in seemed to end abruptly and become parking lanes with no warning, and there’s even this one street in Chinatown with a one-way sign pointing in the wrong direction. I got yelled at during my road test this morning for straddling lanes, even though the markings indicated only a single lane. And don’t even get me started on how narrow the lanes are. Awful. Truly just awful.

My driving instructor and prior driving experience made these lessons go rather smoothly, but still, there were more near misses than I’m proud to admit. I’m amazed that bus drivers can drive around Boston all day without causing massive car crashes.

The Road Test… again

After all that I’d gone through in the past week, retaking the road test felt very anticlimactic. I’d scheduled my test for a Sunday in the winter at 7 AM, so there were almost no pedestrians or other traffic on the roads. I just had to drive around the block, do some maneuvers, and return to the parking lot; all was said and done within 10 minutes. “Eh, good enough” was the only feedback the examiner gave me after the test.

Despite the lack of fanfare, my brain was on a dopamine high the whole time as I biked back to MIT. As anticlimactic as it was, passing this mundane little test that most people pass on their first try as teenagers felt like one of my biggest achievements at MIT. Because finally, I can legally drive alone in Maine now!