Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai driving licenses. This is a little bit of an opinion piece but we will kind of talk about Thai driving licenses, I haven't done a video on that in quite some time. Yes, it is possible for foreign nationals to get a license to drive in Thailand. In the in the past it was a little more straightforward. It has become rather cumbersome quite frankly; I will get into it here in a moment but yeah it is possible to do. Honestly depending on where you are, it has been our experience Bangkok is pretty difficult to get things done in. A lot of the Land Transport Offices are heavily booked up and it is just kind of difficult from the standpoint of getting in the queue and just getting processed through; it is just a lot of demand. We found a lot of clients like doing this out in the provinces although that may not be possible depending on the circumstances for any given person.

More the reason for this video is I was talking to a friend of mine who just went through the driving license process and it literally took this person nearly a week and it was just constant, he just told me, it just sounded like constant bureaucratic obtuseness where he would take a test and the translations would be off, and then he would show where the translations were off and that he had answered their question correctly. No, didn't want to help. It just took day after day of dealing with what can only be described as just redundant bureaucracy for no real reason. I mean he described it as it was almost as if they just wanted to put up a "go away" sign on the door and they didn't want anybody to get a license. He eventually got it and in this particular case he got a motorcycle license and he was telling me that yeah, usually in most cases, this is always my understanding, but usually in most cases you can do both your motorcycle and driving license simultaneously and you get both licenses at the same time. To be clear, they are two different types of licenses here in Thailand; one for a motorcycle and one for a car, a standard car. But then he was told at the end of this, after he had passed everything for the motorcycle, if he wanted to get one for a car he would have to go through the process all over again, all the tests and everything even though they were completely redundant, let's say not completely redundant, there is probably some slight differentiation but I am sure large parts of it could have been duplicated for both processes and he could have done all of it simultaneously. No, they weren't having it.

I am seeing this a lot, I am really seeing this a lot. Unfortunately I am seeing it in the American Immigration apparatus as well as here in Thailand but it is just becoming like this overarching bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake where the process becomes the raison d'être, “the reason for being” of some of these institutions rather than understanding, No, the process is there to get people driver's licenses. Obviously you want to make sure they are competent on the road but what he was describing was not a matter of competence, driving competence or anything else, it was just a matter of just again bureaucratic obtuseness to the point of like I said it almost seemed like they wanted to put a "go away" sign up and just not let anybody get anything done. 

So I hope that changes. Frankly I have got to be honest, I have noticed a lot of less than optimal paradigms since sort of things have started easing up and people are kind of back getting into their old rhythms. Maybe we are just kind of shaking off the cantankerousness of the last two years. I hope that's the case but I definitely hope we don't have to hear about folks going through what my friend went through with respect to the Thai driver's license processing because really what's the point of that?