welcome! hope you brought helmet or hard hat, pads, compass, gps app, tinder, magnifying glass....

At some point in 2011, the State of New York allowed people who were renewing their driver's licenses to do the renewal by mail or online, with no eye test. A driver's license is good for ten years, but the possibility that one's eyes might have changes within 10 years seems to have eluded those chosen to govern us. This is why we so often see cars starting to cross an intersection come to a squealing juddering stop - someone else was coming straight at them and clearly didn't see them.

Actually the last time I had an eye test at our Department of Motor Vehicles, the tester waved her arm at the wall behind her. "You see that chart? with all the letters?" I allowed as how I saw the chart. "OK," said the tester, and she initialed my form and sent me forth to wreak terror on innocent pedestrians and fellow drivers, although only on the days when I forget my glasses.

I find two more recent developments even scarier. The "local geography" section of the exam to get a taxi driver's license has been omitted. I believe this was done on the grounds that when a passenger who wants to get to, say, 86th Street and Madison Avenue notices that the cab is getting on line for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and is at a point where there's no turning back, the passenger's anger and dismay will communicate an error message to the driver. Live and learn.

I recently got in a cab to go to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan, and the driver asked me if that was the same as JFK Airport. Then he asked if I knew how to get there.

After a brief discussion of roadways he'd never heard of,  he told me I should turn on my phone, download Google Maps and have it play the directions to himHe said he had the app on his phone, but the words were too small.

the road to LaGuardia Airport

And the latest - English is no longer required. The  NewYork City taxi driver license test is to be given in your choice of 7 languages. Although since the test won't require you to know where places are, or what is uptown, does it matter what language you don't know things in?

bref-nish

In terms of communication with passengers, I think it's great to have multilingual drivers. People come here from all over the world. N bèlantre! But what about reading street signs? What about understanding the instructions from the passenger? What about asking for help when lost? What about reading Google Maps? In Paris, in Berlin, cab drivers tell me they're required to pass an English test.

Anyway I would suggest that if you're planning to visit NewYork, and I hope you will, you need to take some sensible precautions. The title of this post exaggerates a little. However, in addition to the usual don't accept drinks from strangers, don't shop at a "going out of business" store, keep your purse tightly closed, I suggest that if you're nervous about getting into a vehicle under the control of a possibly vision-impaired non-English-speaking driver who has no idea where to take you, you might get to know our bus system. It's easy. And the bus drivers know where they're going. (ok, don't take a bus to our airports, that way lies madness. Don't fly in or out of LaGuardia, and grit your teeth and take a cab or a car service to Kennedy).

By the way, the reason for the recent loosening of requirements was to make becoming a cab driver more competitive with becoming an Uber driver. They don't have any exam at all.