Confronting Roadblocks en Route to Driving Legally

Where Ann Cheung comes from, people drive on the left side of the street. They don’t worry about maintaining a safe distance from the car in front of them. They don’t look over their shoulders to see whether another motorist is cruising in their blind spot. Where Cheung comes from, the roads are narrow. Merging lanes, bicycle lanes and turning lanes don’t exist.

Perhaps that is why the Hong Kong native, 38, failed her first driving test when she tried to get her California license at the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Santa Monica earlier this month.

Although she had taken 19 hours of lessons from a Los Angeles driving school beforehand, had been a licensed driver in her own country for 10 years and speaks English well, Cheung said she couldn’t always understand the grouchy test examiner’s instructions.

“Because you are nervous, it’s harder. It’s not like doing it in your mother tongue,” she said, still mortified at the test’s outcome. “The inspectors should realize, ‘Hey, they are not from here. They need clear directions.’ ”

Learning to control a motor vehicle and master the rules of the road are hard enough if you’re a teenager who has grown up riding the freeways and has lane changes and rolling California stops coded into your genes. But what if you’re a foreign-born adult who has spent years driving under dramatically different conditions or, even more daunting, never driven at all?

Yet every year, thousands of new arrivals in Los Angeles find themselves in that situation when they move to a city where cars are not only a cultural icon, but can be crucial to economic survival.

“Our driving environment in California, with the multi-lanes, is different from most every other environment outside the U.S.,” said Robert Stall, an officer of the Driving School Assn. of California and owner of the San Fernando Valley’s Dollar Driving School.

“When you are talking about surface streets that have three or four lanes in each direction, and when you consider that many countries have single-lane highways where the drivers really never need to make a lane change, it can be quite a shock for people.”

Stall said the nonnative students who seek training at his school come from all over the world. They range from experienced Western European and Middle Eastern drivers who need to be “re-educated” in skills such as observing speed limits and scanning the road for hazards, to low-income Central Americans and Eastern Europeans who “have never driven a day in their lives, or maybe never even been in a car,” he said.

For those in the latter category, obtaining a license can be a long process. New adult drivers, especially those from other countries, must sometimes take and retake the written and behind-the-wheel tests half a dozen times before they pass, said George Hensel, president of the California Driving School, the region’s largest.

“The foreign-born has not only all the problems that the regular driver has in learning how to drive, but they also have problems overcoming the language differences,” Hensel said. “A simple sign that says something like ‘Shoulder Work Ahead’ can be very confusing. You have to explain, what is a shoulder? Obviously, these are all problems that can be overcome with training and with time, but it does take time.”

To assist foreign-born drivers in securing licenses, the DMV translates its traffic-law manual into five languages--Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. The written test all drivers are required to pass before taking their behind-the-wheel exam is available in more than 30 languages, including Hmong, Arabic, Polish, Japanese, Italian and Hindi.

The road test, on the other hand, is a different story. “During the drive test, applicants need to be able to read signs in English,” said Armando Botello, a DMV spokesman. Bilingual test examiners are permitted to speak to applicants in their native languages. “However, they have to make sure [the applicants] understand the signs that are in English,” Botello said.

Southern California is home to dozens of driving schools that cater to immigrants. The Santa Monica-based Pacific Japan Driving School, for instance, specializes in teaching both young Japanese adults who are attending college in California and Japanese housewives who are known as “paper drivers” because they were licensed in Japan but never drove, having lived in crowded cities where cars were impractical.

Hiromi May Hayashi, the school’s owner, said that because many traffic signs use symbols that are universal, her students generally have an easy time following them. What is difficult for them, however, is getting used to driving on the opposite side of the road from what they are used to.

“They often put the window wiper on instead of a winker signal by mistake,” she said.

One of the largest schools offering bilingual drivers’ training is Ford Driving School in Hollywood, where the staff includes instructors fluent in Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Fernando Rees, the owner, estimates that half his students are newcomers to America and says those with previous driving experience can be the toughest to teach.

“It’s hard, very hard for them to understand that the laws here are made to be followed to the letter, because in many countries, they are not followed at all,” Rees said. “The mechanical part is easy. Rules you can learn. But the attitudes have to be changed, and that is very difficult.”

Like Cheung, most immigrants who sign up for driving lessons are adult women, according to several driving school instructors. Many come from countries where driving is considered either too dangerous or improper for women, or from rural provinces where everyone but the very rich gets around on bicycle or on foot.

“It’s very hard, because they never imagined they would drive here, or in Mexico, or anywhere else,” said Enrique Gallegos, owner of Expo Driving School in Huntington Park. “They get to a point where they realize you have to drive here. You need a car to get around, to take the children to school, to go shopping and everyday things like that.”

That was the case for Isti Budihati, 27, who moved to California from Indonesia a year ago. Budihati never learned to drive in her country--”It’s too crazy for women to drive”--and relied on her father, brother or boyfriend to get around. Her mother didn’t drive either. “All the men drive, not the women. The woman is just a passenger,” she said.

Weary of riding buses and begging rides from her roommates, Budihati decided it was time to overcome her fears and cultural stereotypes and sign up for driving school. She had her first lesson last week and hopes to be driving on her own by midsummer.

Getting her license “means everything,” she said. “I’ll be independent. I won’t have to depend on somebody else for the small things. When I can drive myself anytime I want, that’s good.”

Although the DMV does not track the number of California license holders who are from other countries, foreign-born motorists include another class of driver: illegal immigrants who are driving without licenses because they cannot get them.

When they apply for their licenses, newcomers to California are required to furnish either a Social Security number or, if they are here as students, a letter from the Social Security Administration explaining that they are ineligible.

In September, the state Legislature approved a bill that would remove that requirement and allow individuals who are in the process of legalizing their immigration status to be licensed.

Similar legislation, sponsored by Assemblyman Gilbert Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), was vetoed two years ago by Gov. Gray Davis, who is negotiating with Assembly leaders about the fate of the new bill, said David Galaviz, Cedillo’s legislative aide.

Hensel of the California Driving School says he supports the change as a way to make roads safer. “If they can’t get a license, we can’t train them, and this forces a lot of people who came here illegally to learn from a friend or somebody else, or even worse, to get behind the wheel without any training at all,” he said.

Hensel also supports revising DMV rules to require new adult drivers to receive the same classroom instruction that teenage drivers must undergo.

“In the case of somebody born here, they feel it’s their natural, God-given right to have that license,” he said.

“In the case of the foreign-born, in many cases they never thought they would be able to obtain one. To them, it’s more than a status symbol. It’s more like, ‘I’ve arrived.’ ”

Four days after failing her first driving test, Cheung was back behind the wheel at the Santa Monica DMV. This time, she got a different examiner, a man who greeted her with a smile and a handshake and immediately put her at ease.

“She shouldn’t have any problems,” her California Driving School teacher, Oscar Hunt, said as they pulled away. “She knows how to drive, but basically she didn’t drive enough before, so we had to brush up on things like parking and lane changes.”

Twenty minutes later, Cheung was back in the DMV parking lot, wearing a broad smile and waving a test paper with “Excellent!” handwritten across it.

“This inspector, he was very friendly. Not like the other one. It made a big difference,” she beamed.

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