Editorial: A case for changing our driver licensing process

Image courtesy of LBPost.com

This past week, the city of Long Beach suffered one of the most severe and lengthy power outages that I have recalled in recent memory. For 54 hours, over 50 blocks of downtown Long Beach were without any kind of power. Police scrambled to bring order by shutting down certain streets near work crews, directing traffic during rush hour, and stepping up neighborhood presence to prevent people from taking advantage of the darkness to commit crimes. Public works providers assembled generators and, at key intersections, set them up to power the stop lights to try and provide some semblance of order to the chaos, but the vast majority of stoplights were totally dark.

Now, a good driver would recall from their driver education training that when approaching an intersection with controlled by non-functioning traffic lights that one should treat the intersection as an all-way stop sign. That means bringing the vehicle to a complete stop, yielding to appropriate traffic, and then proceeding when safe. Apparently, the vast majority of drivers failed that part of the driving exam because the sheer number of near collisions that I observed because drivers failed to follow the rules - failing to stop at all, failing to yield, failing to give right of way - makes me wonder how we have managed to get by without many more utter catastrophes.

And speaking of yielding, every state's vehicle code has some provision in it to the effect of "motorists shall yield to pedestrians crossing in a marked crosswalk and only proceed when the pedestrian has reached the other side or at least some physical divider such as a center island." With stoplights out, that also meant pedestrian crossing signals were not functioning and pedestrians were to be treating the intersections as all-way stops as well. Yet, regardless of the presence of pedestrians in any state of crossing the street, some motorists edged into sidewalks, using their vehicles to physically bully the pedestrians into crossing faster, while others completely ignored the presence of pedestrians and proceeded through intersections with utter abandon, sometimes coming within inches of striking a pedestrian crossing the street.

It was during this period, when I tried to stick to my routine and take my regular walks with our dog that I fully understood just how utterly broken out driver education system truly is. It would be one thing if these kinds of close calls and near misses were uncommon and infrequent, but, alas, that is not the case. In the less than 2 full hours I spent outside walking the dog on just one single day, I crossed a grand total of 14 intersections and counted almost 100 near misses between cars and cars, cars and pedestrians, and cars and bikes. Every single incident was avoidable if the driver of the car had been paying attention, understood the laws, and took driving as a serious activity requiring focus and concentration instead of a chore to be done with the greatest degree of disdain.

Editorial: Learn to ride a motorcycle

A while back, I shared my thoughts on why I ride a motorcycle. For me, it is a part of my life that I embrace and enjoy. Getting to this point meant a lot of lessons learned and I wanted to share some of those lessons to help others who are interested in getting into motorcycling. Keep in mind that I am certainly no professional rider, just an enthusiast who loves to ride, but I hope some of the lessons I learned along the way can help others avoid making the same mistakes.

Lots of people have different ideas about how to approach learning to ride a motorcycle. Some people believe in the "throw you in the deep end" philosophy, which pretty much entails hopping onto a bike and figuring things out. Others feel like the "baby steps" approach is right and take forever to graduate from riding around in parking lots to actually hitting the streets. While no single approach is going to be best for every new rider, there are a few basic things that every person who is interested in learning to ride a motorcycle should think about when they are first starting out.