Getting my Illinois Drivers Licence

OK, I haven't done a lot of driving over here so far, a bit of local stuff and some cruising to Chicago and back. Luckily I have my navigator ;), by far the worst part of driving in any new place is finding your way around and when it's on the other side of the road trying to concentrate on navigation is just one more undesirable distraction.

So far I have been just using my NZ drivers licence, as far as I can tell according to Illinois law it is perfectly legal as long as I have a valid visa, so on my F-1 I am good to drive with that for at least a couple of years. However it is also a requirement to have insurance, and the insurance company demand that I get an Illinois licence within 30 days, or be in the process of getting it.

To get an Illinois Drivers Licence however you need a Social Security Number (SSN). If you're unfamiliar with what this is, it is a magical number that is required to do most things in the US, but if that number gets in the wrong hands then it can cause problems (think credit issues linked to you via your SSN). It is not just a tax number (like the NZ IRD number or the NI number in the UK).

As a foreigner I have to apply for a SSN, and this can take several weeks. You may be able to spot the potential issue here with my drivers licence... Anyway, I could apply through the university, a Social Security representative turned up to go through all the paperwork of the hundred or so of us in the line and told me I would have mine in a few weeks.

In the meantime I was reading through the Illinois road code - as Illinois has no licence recognition agreements with any other countries (or indeed other states from what I can tell) and requires you to sit the full test. I was a bit nervous, I haven't sat a driving test in years and this was in a foreign country driving on the other side of the road. I think I have it down pretty well but who knows what I would need to do - parallel parking for example is pretty rare here and I haven't done one while driving on the right. As an aside I am surprised how much less flexible I seem to be looking to my right through the back window than when I had to turn my head left to do it. Seriously, I am a good few seconds slower at orienting myself in the car as well, I guess all those years of practice have made it second nature and now I have to learn a new side!

In the end it was a bit of an anticlimax. I turned up and took my number, waited,  handed over all the documentation, proof of address, passport, visa etc and went over to a little booth to sit my exam. 20 questions on basic road code (about a third was "what does this sign mean") and I was back to the desk to let them know I was done. I then just had to wait until a driving examiner was available.

The driving test was super basic. I mean, all I really did was turn left and right and do one three point turn. I also had to pull over at one point and then tell the instructor how I would turn the wheels if I was parked on a hill. No parallel parking, no hill starts (no hills), not even driving on multi-lane roads. I did clear up an argument for the staff though, they were evenly split over whether we drove on the right side or the "wrong" side of the road in New Zealand

So now I have a US drivers licence in the state of Illinois. One definite benefit is now I have a State ID, invaluable as otherwise I had to use my passport for everything. And I have only driven on the left once so far...