[lmm]

IDPs are still very much useful and needed - short of the world agreeing on a single standard for what a driving license should look like, they're a lot more practical than expecting everyone to understand 192 different formats (and a few crazy countries like the USA even issue dozens of different license formats within the country). Delegating it to some random driving-related third party is slightly weird but not that weird (in my country they're done by the Post Office, which is arguably weirder, but I guess they also handle passport applications so it makes a certain amount of sense from that perspective).

[YZF]

There are many countries where just having a standard-ish license with English is perfectly fine. I think last time we had a thread on this topic someone mentioned a few countries where that wasn't true but most of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, (edit: UK), and a bunch of other countries will just take your local plastic license as long as it has English on it.

[ricudis]

I have never driven a car outside of my own country, and I always wondered how they even allow you to drive a car without getting re-trained in a country where the driving system is so different than where you obtained your license (I'm looking at you, Commonwealth countries). Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? It surely needs a little bit of adapting as a pedestrian.

[cjs_ac]

> Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side?

You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine.

There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.

[spauldo]

The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.

Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.

[wtmt]

> The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.

This is something to learn the very first time when getting into a (new/unfamiliar) car before getting the vehicle moving.

Come to India and drive a few cars from different brands. [1] The rule is to drive on the left side of the road (so the driver is on the right side of the vehicle). But the sticks/levers to turn on the windshield wiper may be on the right side of the steering wheel or on the left side (and vice versa for the turn indicator sticks/levers), depending on the manufacturer. If you don’t check it in advance, you may end up wiping the windshield when you want to signal a turn or end up signaling a turn when you want to get water off the windshield.

[1]: Actually, it’s not recommended for foreigners to attempt to drive in India. The traffic is chaotic and one needs a different way of thinking to drive.

[vtbassmatt]

Accidentally turning on the wipers was definitely #1 for me. A close second was nearly turning the wrong way in roundabouts. I’m not sure why regular box turns were easy to mentally flip but roundabouts just broke my brain instead.

[YZF]

I've driven in many countries including some pretty crazy ones and ones that drive on the wrong side of the road. You adjust/adapt ;) Every now and then though I still turned on the windshield wipers instead of signalling... And when the roads were completely empty you sometimes don't think and almost turn into the wrong lane... And roundabouts are also fun, like driving in Paris with their crazy multi-lane roundabouts.

The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!

[lmm]

> The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!

That's pretty normal, a lot of countries do something similar. They want to permit tourists and people on temporary work assignments to drive, but if you're actually moving to Canada for the long term they expect you to take a proper test.

[lmm]

Realistically the answer is probably that countries accept a certain risk of collisions in the interest of good international relations and the resulting tourism and business. They might also trust visitors to pay more attention. There are rules that attempt to restrict the abuse of IDPs (e.g. available for a max period of 1 year and only available in your home country, and in some countries it may be illegal for people on longer-term visa statuses to use them), but it's all tradeoffs. I can imagine that e.g. Uber might be lobbying politicians to make them less widely available, and they may succeed.

[tptacek]

Contrary to the sibling commenters, I found this pretty tricky to do; I was always too close to the curb or the lane marker, I lost my natural sense of where my car was positioned on the road. I have the same general surprise that you can just use a US license to drive in Europe --- but you can. The IDP seems pretty silly, especially knowing what little it takes to pick one up.

[lmm]

You could certainly question the wisdom of allowing short-term foreign visitors to drive on their foreign licenses, but taking that policy decision as a given the IDP is a reasonable implementation of it (even if I suspect its main function is to attach a fraud penalty to the "Prawo Jazdy" wheeze). Maybe something akin to the machine-readable passport code would be an improvement, but considering how long the likes of Real ID adoption have taken and that the IDP system isn't particularly broken, I can see why that wouldn't be prioritised.

[portaouflop]

There are many countries outside of the Anglosphere though…

[cjs_ac]

An IDP isn't a driving licence; it's an internationally-agreed and -recognised document that asserts that 'this other document I have is a driving licence.' I think the main value of an IDP is that it avoids this sort of situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DQBc3eFUlU

[closewith]

Although it wouldn't have helped in that situation, as the Polish don't need IDPs in Ireland.

[lmm]

The point is that if the Polish did need IDPs in Ireland then it would. Very few things help when you don't use them.

[closewith]

I don't think it would, because this happened because of the old format paper Irish driver's licenses which had the driver's name in the top left hand corner, where prawo jazdy was written on the polish plastic cards.

But anyway, IDPs will never be required in the EU.