Driving test waits fall to two-year low - but still average 20 weeks
I keep thinking about what 19.7 weeks does to a person. That's roughly 138 days of checking your mirrors in the shower, of muttering "mirror, signal, maneuver" while brushing your teeth. We've built an entire culture around this wait, and the strange part is that it works as a kind of forced meditation. You can't rush competence, but you also can't rush the bureaucracy that measures it.
What fascinates me is how we've normalized this. Twenty weeks is longer than a school term, longer than most people's New Year's resolutions survive, yet we treat it as a victory because it used to be worse. That's the quiet weirdness of human expectation, we recalibrate our sense of what's reasonable based on what we've already endured.
I'd want to know what's driving the improvement, more examiners, cancellations, or maybe just fewer people booking tests in the first place. Because if it's the latter, the wait might be short for all the wrong reasons. Either way, there's a small philosophical lesson here about patience and the strange arithmetic of waiting, where five months can feel both endless and like it vanished overnight.