Absurdity
Teen Fails Driver's Test For Stopping Too Completely At Stop Sign
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
SACRAMENTO, CA: Megan Pruitt, 16, of Sacramento, had her driver's license application denied Thursday after executing what certified driving examiner Dale Hoffstetter officially logged as an "unsafe and atypical deceleration to a full stop" at the intersection of Fair Oaks Boulevard and Sycamore Drive.
The stop, witnesses confirm, was complete. The vehicle did not roll. It did not creep. It achieved zero miles per hour and remained there for approximately two seconds, the duration recommended by the California Driver Handbook, which is a document the DMV publishes and which Megan had apparently read.
This was the problem.
"A complete stop in that context creates an expectation gap between the test vehicle and surrounding traffic," Hoffstetter explained in a statement released through the DMV's Office of Driver Safety Communication, which is a real office that exists to say things like that. "Our evaluation criteria reflect real-world driving conditions, and in real-world driving conditions, nobody does that."
Hoffstetter has administered 2,300 driving tests. He estimates eleven people have come to a full stop at a stop sign. Six of them failed. The other five, he said, "sort of recovered."
Megan's mother, Cheryl Pruitt, said she watched the test from the DMV parking lot and felt the stop looked "extremely normal, maybe the most normal thing she has ever done."
Cheryl also mentioned that she personally rolls stop signs "pretty much every time" and has held a valid California license for twenty-two years without incident, which she offered not as an indictment of the system but as context, though it functions as both.
The California DMV, for its part, maintains that the test is designed to evaluate whether an applicant can operate a vehicle safely in actual traffic, and that actual traffic in California operates on a social contract that has quietly renegotiated the stop sign from a legal requirement into a strong suggestion, and that testing applicants against a stricter standard than the one used by every licensed driver already on the road is, in their words, "beyond the scope of this conversation."
Traffic safety researcher Dr. Yolanda Finch at UC Davis noted that rear-end collisions at intersections spike when one driver stops unexpectedly, and that in California the unexpected thing is stopping. "The sign says stop," Dr. Finch said. "The culture says yield aggressively. Megan, unfortunately, listened to the sign."
Megan is permitted to retest in two weeks. Her father has offered to take her out to practice, which in this case means teaching her to do the thing she did correctly, but worse.
She is reportedly considering public transit.
The stop sign in question has no comment, as it is a sign.
The story we are making fun of: https://babylonbee.com/news/california-teen-flunks-drivers-license-test-for-fully-stopping-at-stop-sign/