Driving licenses in Finland

Starting last month the process for obtaining a driving license in Finland was changed again. The previous process consisted of two phases with the initial phase containing a bulk of the education and teaching. The second phase of the license consisted of some extra lessons and had to be attended within two years of getting the first phase license. Starting this year the amount of phases has been raised to three and the practicalities of all this are still fairly vague to me.

The multiphase systems have been always motivated by the desire to decrease the probability of young drivers to get into accidents. Proponents argue that more lessons will get young drivers to be more responsible and drive more safely. Perhaps so, but the flip side of the coin is that, well, this costs many more coins. Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, ran a story today where they had found that costs for the end customer obtaining a driving license had gone up by as much as 1 000 euros with the entire driving license costing at most around 3 000 euros.

At the same time we can take a look at the statistics provided by Statistics Finland. The chart in question visualizes the deaths in road accidents from 1970 to 2011, with the black line being total deaths, green line being age group of 25-64 years, yellow 15-24 years, and red 0-14 years.

So, to be honest, at least the mortality statistics do not really paint a very grim picture. The two-phase system was introduced in Finland in 1989 and the three-phase system now in 2013. However, I would venture a guess that a bulk of the decline in accidents can in fact be attributed to the improvement of car technology as well as the fact that Finns are finally buying newer cars with better safety equipment. Regardless, the trend is quite clear.

What, then, is the financial impact? Helsingin Sanomat mentions that on average the total cost for a license has gone up by around 600 euros. Over the past five years the yearly licenses granted have been quite steady at around 70 000, so with this single change the driving license industry has increased its revenues by a rather nice 42 million euros. Not too shabby when the current discourse is on how youngsters in cities are less likely to drive licenses these days as public transport coverage combined with limited parking spaces, high fuel costs, and whatnot make car ownership and operation not too attractive in the urban environment.

Only time will tell how the accident statistics evolve, but one thing is certain: the government has managed to quite nicely prop up an industry by bringing in added bureaucracy and legislation. I do not have statistics at hand, but a gut feeling would be that if road safety is something we want to improve, things like road design and maintenance, quality of cars, even speed limits would bring significant improvements to it. Of course maintenance of a road network is costly, but quality of cars can easily be improved by decreasing taxation of newer cars and offset by shifting taxation to fuels and speed limits can be changed by changing the sign on the side of the road.