Daily Dose of English 52
Driving
Daily Dose of English 52
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about driving. Driving a car. because that's the word that we use pretty much exclusively for cars. You can drive other things as well, like a train driver or a pilot. Somebody pilots a plane, you don't drive a plane. And there's a couple other things that you can drive, but typically we use it for cars only. I guess vans and trucks and buses as well, but cars or motor vehicles, as we say. And so the default understanding of the word drive is a car, because that's what most people drive. Especially in the US where driving is really, really common. In fact, pretty much everybody drives or has to drive, or they're kind of forced into taking pretty poor public transit, pretty bad public transit. There's not very good of options in most of the United States. And so kind of everybody has to drive. It's not really a choice, sadly. And a lot of people learn to drive when they're 16 years old. Well, actually, they learn to drive when they're 15, but you can legally get your driver's license at 16. And that means that you can be 16 years old and drive legally with the exact same rights and abilities as a 30-year-old. which seems very, very early, honestly. People are very, very young to learn to drive. And that's just kind of, it's, I don't know, it seems wrong that we allow such a young kids, because they are kids, right? 15 year olds and 16 year olds aren't, even 18 year olds aren't fully ready and developed yet. And we let them drive all over the place, to school, to work, to parties, to see friends, to everything. And it does cause problems, right? There's lots of traffic accidents or collisions that happen from younger drivers. And it's just a normal thing though, because everybody has to drive in a lot of ways. I learned to drive when I was, I think, 15. because I got a, what we call a learner's permit when I was 15. And that's what you can do when you're 15. You can get a learner's permit, which means that you can drive legally if a licensed adult is in the car with you. So like if your parent is sitting next to you, you're allowed to drive, which is also kind of crazy because that's saying that you're, you can be 15 years old and drive a car. Sure. You have somebody there helping you, but you're still driving it and I don't know, controlling this really heavy car. It's meant to be for learning, right? So that you can learn how to drive with your parent next to you for a while. And I think that it gives you some sort of benefit. So if you've had your learner's permit for six months or something like that, then when you turn 16, you can immediately get your driver's license and drive fully. Like you can have all your, there's no restrictions on your driving essentially. And so I think I did that right around my 16th birthday. I don't remember exactly. And so I've been able to drive for quite a long time. A large part of my life has been able to drive. However, I don't really like to drive. For many reasons, like I've talked about in other episodes, it's just not... Fun, I don't like it at all really because it's not a pleasure activity It's a utility activity to get from somewhere to somewhere else I can totally understand people who like to drive for pleasure, right? So like racing or going on long drives to in beautiful places and parts of the world or whatever. However, driving like around the city or to the store is not fun. It's sort of just a waste of time because you have to be very focused because you're driving a very heavy vehicle And you have to be aware of your surroundings and attent and alert to what's going on. And that's just not that much fun to do, honestly. Especially if it's nighttime or it's raining or there's something in the way where you sort of feel a bit more stressed out. I can't see very well at night, right? My eyes aren't that good without light. Which means that driving at night is not that much fun. It's harder to see, I have to be really focused, and it's just a bit annoying. And so I prefer not to drive if I don't have to. It's just not something that I enjoy doing. However, like I said, it's pretty much a default for getting around. Because the way that our cities have been built and designed is that you need a car to get around. The assumption or the idea that people have in their minds when they make and think about our cities is that everybody has a car, which means that it removes a lot of the things that would be nicer for people that aren't in a car. For example, when I was growing up, I lived relatively close to a park and it was nice to go to. However, There was a humongous road right between where my house was. You'd walk a few minutes and then you'd see this road and then you'd have to cross the road to get to the park eventually. And it was like this big barrier. It's hard to get across just because it's so wide and there's always cars going and they go so fast. And there was only a couple of locations where you can press a button and stop traffic, so like a crosswalk, we call them. But you don't really want to go out of your way, right? You have to walk an additional five or six minutes just to get to this crosswalk to cross the street, which just seems very backwards. And this kind of thing happens a lot in the US, where there's two or three parts of a city that are completely separated because there's roads or highways between them. And I've experienced this in several, like also here in Mexico, right? There's parts of a city that you, it's hard to get out of a part of a city if you don't have a car, just because you have to cross this really busy, big intersection or streets to get somewhere else. And so that's another reason that I don't really like to drive, because I just feel like I'm way in the way of people trying to live their lives, to walk, and that sort of thing. Cars are also really loud, and they're just, I don't know, I just don't like them that much. So I guess it's not surprising. But a really good example of how default, I keep using this word, but how ingrained driving is into the United States like sort of culture, is that our primary form, our main identification, is a driver's license. So a lot of people in the U.S. only have a driver's license as their way to prove who they are to the government, right? Some people have passports, but I think it's less than 50% of Americans have a passport. which isn't a driver's license, and getting a specific government ID is a lot harder than you might think. Yes, you can get it, and it's actually not that bad, but getting a driver's license in many ways is easier than getting a regular identification. For example, my driver's license relatively recently expired sometime last year, and I had to get a new one. And so all I did was I went on to the website, the government website, and I was like, hey, I need to renew this. And they're like, great, pay us $50, and we'll send it to your house. I didn't have to go anywhere. I didn't have to prove anything. I didn't have to prove my residency. And so I just did that. That's all that I had to do. And they just sent me the new identification and driver's license, which gives me permission to drive a car for another 10 years or whatever, which is crazy. Um, and this place that we go to do the stuff related to driver's licenses and that sort of thing is called the DMV or the department of motor vehicles, the DMV. And it's known for being a terrible place is how a lot of people think about it because the lines are really long. You have to wait a long time. They're not very interested. And it's very gray. And the whole place is just kind of dull and boring. And you have to wait. And then they call your name. And then you have to go bring all your documents. And if any of your documents have anything incorrect, they'll send you back home. And it's confusing. And it's stressful. And yeah, a lot of people really don't like going to the DMV. and would rather go to the doctor or the dentist or something like that. However, thankfully, I didn't have to go, honestly, as I don't want to go to the DMV. But I was able to renew my driver's license just fine online. And yeah. Anyways, I think that's enough for the driving episode here. I think I'm going to continue talking about this topic a little bit on the next episode. So I'll see you then. Have a good one. Bye.
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