Hazards of the Road : DMV Examiners in Pasadena Learn Hard Way Who Can Drive
Jyi-Yi Chiu was doing just fine, until Richard Ascar told her to make a right turn into the parking lot. Chiu turned too wide, stepped on the gas instead of the brakes and bonked into a metal gatepost.
The brand new Toyota sported a pitiful punched-in look, with a deep crease down the front and a lopsided bulge to the hood. “I didn’t see the gate,” said Chiu fretfully.
Chiu had just flunked her driving test in a rather spectacular fashion. Ascar, a Department of Motor Vehicles licensing and registration examiner in Pasadena, summarily rejected Chiu’s application for a California driver’s license.
“I never had an accident before,” Ascar said, waving his hand in agitation.
Ascar, a 12-year veteran of the DMV, is one of the rare ones. Most of the examiners at the office on Rosemead Boulevard say they’ve been averaging about one accident a year while administering road tests, from modest fender-benders to astounding wall-bangers.
The cinder-block wall that separates DMV from the RB Furniture Store parking lot next door has been jolted so often by careening test-takers that RB demanded that metal poles be
installed as barricades on the DMV side.
“When I first took the job, I figured I’d just be driving around with them for a couple of blocks,” said examiner Frances Torres, who has been testing drivers for two years. “It never occurred to me that I’d be dealing with people who had no knowledge at all of what it means to be behind the wheel.”
The bustling Pasadena DMV office, where an overflow crowd of between 1,200 and 1,400 people a day goes to take care of car business, has become one of the doorways through which a growing immigrant population in the San Gabriel Valley passes into the freeway society.
Pasadena examiners can administer the written test for a driver’s license in two dozen languages, including Samoan, Thai, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Armenian, Russian, Polish and Greek.
But you never know what you’ll get from those pulling into the road test line behind the building, examiners say. The urgency to get a driver’s license in Southern California, where cars often represent the only means of getting to work or play, brings some unlikely applicants to the Pasadena DMV office.
“Once, I flunked a woman after she had driven a block,” says Greg Doherty, a 17-year veteran who is usually given the office’s hard cases. “She told me she had never driven a car in her life before. She said she’d been watching people.”
Last year, about 30,000 people took the road test at the Pasadena office, resulting in nine accidents--and countless near misses, according to examiners. That was up from five in 1988 and four in 1987. Almost 30% of those who take the road test in Pasadena fail, significantly higher than the average of between 22% and 25% in 175 state offices.
Pasadena’s fail rate is partly because it’s used as a site for testing drivers of big rigs and buses, as well as regular drivers, says branch manager Rawlin Mull.
“About 40% of the commercial drivers fail,” says Mull.
But the Pasadena office also is the DMV office of choice for thousands of recent arrivals from countries where there’s little opportunity to learn behind-the-wheel skills or freeway etiquette.
“You and I grew up driving around with our moms, racing from stop sign to stop sign in a car, not in a basket on a bicycle,” says one street-hardened examiner.
During one afternoon on the line recently, Doherty wrestled for control of the steering wheel with one young novice driver who was accelerating toward the rear end of another car.
“It was not a mistake in driving skill,” said the miffed test-taker. “It was the meaning of his words. I didn’t understand what he was saying.”
Then Doherty got into the passenger seat of a brand new Cadillac and quizzed an elderly man who was there to have his license recertified.
The man’s wife stood tensely on the sidewalk, watching her husband fumble ineffectually with the controls. “I hope to God he fails,” she muttered. “He has no business being behind the wheel.” Her husband was 79 and in failing health, said the woman.
“I’m afraid to get into the car with him,” she said. “No, he hasn’t had any accidents. God knows why not. Somebody must be watching out for him.”
Doherty failed the man before the car left the curb. “I could tell he had some problems,” said Doherty. “He wasn’t even aware that the motor wasn’t running.”
According to a DMV spokesman, the accident rate for road tests statewide has been rising precipitously in recent years. Last year, there were 295 accidents during road tests, with 34 resulting in injuries to examiners. That was up from 210 accidents in 1988 and 185 in 1987.
In San Mateo last month, an examiner suffered a severe back sprain when an applicant unexpectedly shifted into reverse and floored the accelerator, smashing his car into the DMV building.
Put two examiners together, and they start telling war stories.
Doherty points at the RB wall, next to which drivers pull in after they have finished their tests. “I went through that wall last July,” Doherty says. “A gal hit the gas instead of the brake, and she knocked a hole in the wall the size of the car.”
Billy Barnes, RB’s warehouse manager at the time, says he was standing on the other side of the wall when the car crashed through. “I saw the examiner sitting there, shaking his head,” says Barnes, who has since transferred to another RB facility. “Somebody said, ‘I guess he’s not going to pass her.’ ”
Doherty says his only injury came a few years ago in another parking lot accident, when he tried to grab a gear shift whose handle was cracked. “The driver sort of froze on the accelerator, and we had a choice of hitting some pedestrians or some motorcycles,” Doherty says. “I grabbed the wheel and tried to throw it into park, and we wound up sitting on a couple of Kawasakis. I cut my finger.”
Others have wrenched their backs or necks. “When everything is moving at 35 m.p.h. and all of a sudden it stops, it sort of makes you sore all over,” said one examiner.
Ed Snyder, DMV deputy chief of field operations, said new examiners are given three weeks of training for road tests, including instruction on when and how to seize the steering wheel or to apply the emergency brake.
“We show them how to take control of a vehicle and even how to reach over (from the passenger seat) and step on the brake, if possible,” says Snyder.
“Boogie rides,” examiner Martin Delgado calls the wild, unpredictable forays into the traffic.
“Those are the scary ones,” he says, describing a few near misses he has experienced. “You have to be able to react, be defensive.”
It’s a lesson that some learn the hard way. Examiner John Ray was almost finished testing a man last year, when he directed the driver to make a turn.
“He was doing real good until that point,” Ray says. “But he lost it a little coming around the corner. I looked down for a second to make a note. When I looked back up, all I could see was the rear end of a Chevy.”
The driver’s car was totaled, Ray recalls. “It just kind of peeled back from the hood.” But Ray learned a valuable lesson. “From now on, I don’t look down.”
