ON DRIVER'S LICENCES
S Peter Davis

Quirky fact about me #683: I don't drive. Not that I can't drive, although by extension that is also true, because I never learned. I just don't. It's a lifestyle choice that I've long given up on expecting anyone to understand.

However, an experience I had today led me to muse on the role of the car in our western society. I was denied membership to a local video store this afternoon because I didn't have a driver's licence. Although I had photo identification and all of the paperwork that confirms my existence, even my passport and unopened bank statements addressed to me, it was particularly the absence of a driver's licence that marked me as a suspicious and fraudulent character. It was a dealbreaker - I absolutely could not prove my existence to the management of GO VIDEO without that one little card, and only that card.

In Australia, we do have an alternate identification card. It's called an 18+ card, a dorky little green thing that, amusingly and perhaps ironically, nobody takes seriously as a means of identification. It's useful if you want to buy alcohol and you look underage (a problem I haven't had for half a decade) but that's about the extent of it. Although it's issued through the same official channels as a driver's licence and is presumably no easier to forge, people are just uncomfortable with an 18+ card. Because it's unusual. They react to it awkwardly, staring at it, sighing and muttering to themselves, and look at you with an expression that asks don't you just have a driver's licence there somewhere, to save me the trouble of working out if this is really a thing?

I had a different hairstyle when this picture was taken.

Not driving, itself, is very rarely an inconvenience for me. I never have to think about it. I'm adept at public transport and I actually like to walk. I don't have much of a travel bug. But it's still fairly inconvenient, purely because of all the things you need a driver's licence to do which have nothing to do with driving. In fact, it started when I left school and applied for my 18+ card - I was told I couldn't have one without a bank account. The reason I needed the card was so that I could use it to open a bank account, which the bank was adamant I couldn't do without a driver's licence, or, begrudgingly, an 18+ card. I can't remember how I got around that in the end.

I'm embarrassed when I whip out my dorky green ID and people question me about my puzzling lack of a driver's licence. I've often considered telling people that I lost my licence doing awesome wheelies and burnouts in my souped up car which I love because cars are totally sweet. In the end, I find it puzzling that I should be embarrassed in the first place. I don't have a licence to do lots of things. I don't have a licence to operate a crane, or to own a boat, or to kill. And when you think about it, requiring people to do any of those things in order to be considered a good enough citizen to rent movies would be an absurd proposition. We'd consider this to be an awfully broken society if the possession of a gun licence was a mandatory measure of your validity as a person.

Okay, everything appears to be in order here. Here are your DVDs.

I'm not an environmentalist. Well, I suppose I am, in the same roundabout way that I'm a feminist, only because I'm not not either of those things, I understand the issues and the need to work to resolve them. But I'm not an activist, I don't get worked up, I don't shun the automobile for its offense to nature (though, when in need of an excuse for not driving, that's always a convenient lie). I'm not trying to set an example. I don't care if you drive. Good, in fact - you can help me with large purchases. At the same time, I find it curious that so many who are passionate about the environment are still hung up on the car. A big issue for carbon emissions is meat, and because many environmentalists are already vegetarians for other reasons (and, probably, better reasons), it's not considered strange to give it up. Also antagonised is the bourgeois flippancy of energy wastage - do you really need all those lights? That air conditioner? Three televisions? Ask anyone about their car, though, and they won't seem particularly concerned - sure, we all want the hydrogen car with its harmless, sweet-smelling vapours, but until that happens, you'll excuse us if we keep belching smog. Even hippies have things to do and places to be.

There is a natural anathema surrounding the idea of a standard identification card for people. There's just something, if you'll excuse the groan-worthy cliche, Orwellian about it. People aren't products! Don't barcode me, man! But I don't think that a lot of people really consider the extent to which their driver's licence has become their person licence. When the police or some institution asks you for your ID, they're asking you for the document that proves you drive a car. If you don't have that, there's something fishy about you, something not quite on the level. And isn't there a problem with that? In a world where we're becoming genuinely concerned about the number of cars on the road, shouldn't we examine the way that having a licence to drive has been inseperably intertwined with everything else we do in society? Getting that licence has become a rite of passage for everyone upon graduating school, because it's the first thing you need. It's your key to everything you need to do as an adult. Open a bank account, whip out the driver's licence. Get a job, driver's licence. Sign a lease, driver's licence. Want to travel? You're going to need a passport, and a driver's licence. For those of us, admittedly the minority, who have no interest in these giant metal contraptions, society just gives a heavy sigh, puts a hand to its collective forehead, and tells us look, just fucking drive. You'll make life easier for everybody.

Why do you have to be difficult?

We live in a society where our cars are an extension of us, a prosthesis, part of our identity. It seems absurd when you step back from it, because a car is a machine just like any other, and we have so many machines, many of them more essential than a car. Yet we don't feel emasculated without our lawnmower, or our boat, or our electric jug. Should we wonder how we got this way? It's just designed like this. You leave school, you get your car, you get your licence to drive (which is also your licence to be) and now you're a citizen. That's just the way it works.

I hear stories about places in China and in northern Europe where everybody rides a bike, and I wonder how exclusive this situation is to us. I wonder if anyone ever has trouble renting movies in Trondheim, and then cycling home.

You want this fruit? Show me your bike licence.