Taking driving lessons is even more of a wait; driving schools overcrowded | Car

The road to the driver’s license was long. Due to corona, the waiting time at the Central Bureau for Driving Skills for the practical exam rose to 22 weeks. Because the six hundred driving examiners worked a lot of overtime, that has now fallen to thirteen weeks. If you book a re-examination, you have to wait six weeks.

But there are also delays in the lessons themselves. The industry can hardly cope with the continuing large flow of students, reports NXXT Rijscholen, which is one of the major players with 114 affiliated driving schools. There is an ‘extremely large shortage’ of driving instructors and due to the waiting times at the CBR, the flow is halted.

According to NXXT, there is room immediately for sixty new driving schools, especially in North Brabant and Utrecht. “Sometimes we have to tell students: we are full for a while, go get your theory first,” says Jan Catsburg, director of NXXT Rijscholen.

Anyone who intervenes and wants to take an exam will then be confronted with the waiting lists at the CBR. Many people stop taking lessons while waiting for the exam. According to Catsburg, not everyone is still exam worthy in that case. “That also has a negative effect on the driving school industry as a whole: a student can get the impression that money is being knocked out of his pocket if it turns out that he or she needs more lessons to be able to drive successfully.” On average there are ten lessons. needed during the waiting period. Catsburg: ,,That will cost 450 euros.”

It doesn’t look like the waiting time issues will be over any time soon. Although there are currently a hundred new driving instructors in training, the IBKI exam institute is also struggling with waiting lists. It can take several months before a driving instructor can take the exam himself. Catsburg: “The result is that the motivated student has to wait an extremely long time before the exam can be taken.”

The CBR wants to recruit two hundred new examiners next year. There are now more than six hundred, but the turnover is high due to retirement, among other things. CBR director Alexander Pechtold: ,,It is quite a search. Because many people can drive, but not everyone is cut out for the profession of an examiner. You must be analytical, sharp and didactic, but also be able to put the candidate at ease. Only a small percentage of all applicants make it to the finish line.”

Pechtold reflects the criticism of the driving schools on the waiting times at the CBR. “A lot of the efforts of our examiners go into the many re-examinations and that can be different. We see that people are often insufficiently prepared for the exam. The pass rate for the first practical exam has fluctuated around 50 percent for years. That’s shockingly low. We even have to cancel a practical test prematurely about three thousand times a year, because candidates drive too dangerously. This tells us that people come to exam too early. Saving money is usually the underlying idea for candidates, but cheap is often expensive. If you have had too few driving lessons and you fail, you will eventually lose more money. Hence our advice to the candidates: find a good driving school with a high pass rate and come well prepared for the exam, so that you pass the first time.”