A Driving School in France Hits a Wall of Regulations
By Suzanne Daley, NY Times, Aug. 23, 2014
PARIS--Alexandre Chartier and Benjamin Gaignault work off Apple computers and have no intention of ever using the DVD player tucked in the corner of their airy office. But French regulations demand that all driving schools have one, so they got one.
Mr. Chartier, 28, and his partner, Mr. Gaignault, 25, are trying to break into the driving school business here, using computer technology to match teachers and students across France and to offer cut rates.
But they are not having an easy time. The other driving schools have sued them, saying their innovations break the rules. Their application for an operator’s license for their school, Ornikar, has been met with total silence at the prefecture.
“It seems like the idea is to wait us out until we run out of money,” Mr. Gaignault said recently. “There is an effort to just destroy us.”
Partly because they are young business school graduates and partly because getting a driver’s license here is so difficult and expensive that it has inspired books on the subject, Mr. Chartier and Mr. Gaignault have become minor celebrities. Various experts say their struggle highlights how the myriad rules governing driving schools--and 36 other highly regulated professions--stifle competition and inflate prices in France.
The rules set up barriers to newcomers, sometimes indirectly. Lowering them has become a critical test of France’s willingness to confront its declining competitiveness and the drain of its young people to London and other more flexible places from a country where protecting entrenched interests has always ranked higher, politically and culturally, than innovation.
Now, however, with France’s economy faltering and the Socialist government desperate to do something to revive its popularity, some experts expect that President François Hollande’s administration may finally take steps to tear down the tangle of rules that keep competition--and many young people--out of so many sectors of the economy.
But there has been scant progress so far. In the case of driving schools, the government offers only a limited number of exams each year, and these are doled out to the driving schools depending on their success rate the year before. That fact alone gives the old guard a virtual monopoly, according to Gaspard Koenig, who wrote a book on his own (failed) efforts to get a driver’s license here, despite having graduated from one of France’s most elite universities.
“The system is absurd,” said Mr. Koenig, who was a speechwriter for Christine Lagarde when she was the French finance minister. “You are begging to get into the classes. You are getting shouted at by these teachers. It is humiliating.” Mr. Koenig finally got his license in London.
Since then, he has been campaigning for changes, including calling for an overhaul of the written test, which he says goes far beyond making sure that a person knows the rules of the road. Instead, he said, it seems intended to trip students up with ridiculous questions, such as: If you run headlong into a wall, would you be safer if you were in a tank or in a car? (The answer: a car, because it has air bags.)
Meanwhile, Mr. Koenig says, the system makes it possible for the driving schools to make outsize profits.
Some studies have concluded that the French are probably paying 20 percent more than they should for the services they get from regulated professions, which include notaries, lawyers, bailiffs, ambulance drivers, court clerks, driving instructors and more.
When Greece needed its bailout, the first thing demanded by its international lenders--the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund--was that similar regulations be eliminated as quickly as possible. Some progress has been made.
In France, entrepreneurs like Mr. Chartier and Mr. Gaignault are still waiting for a break, as are, no doubt, the tens of thousands of visitors to their website hoping to get driver’s licenses in a cheaper, faster way.
The failure rate for the French driving exam is about 41 percent, the government office for road safety said. The cost to the economy goes beyond the embarrassment of those who fail, according to those who have studied it.
Francis Kramarz, an economist who has studied the French licensing system, says that barriers to getting a license are so high that about one million French people, who should have licenses, have never been able to get them. Although it is technically possible to reduce the cost by having parents teach students in a dual-control car, few expect to succeed this way, and so it is rarely done.
Mr. Kramarz said that it often costs 3,000 euros, or about $3,900, to get a license. But others said the average was closer to 1,500 to 2,000 euros.
“Not having a license has a major impact on employment possibilities,” he said, if only because it makes getting a job in a neighboring town out of reach.
Young men in France routinely used to get their licenses during their year of military service. But the requirement to serve was eliminated in the mid-1990s, throwing a flood of new customers into a closed market. Mr. Chartier said he got the idea for Ornikar because so many of his friends were so frustrated with the system.
“It didn’t happen to me,” Mr. Chartier said. “But it was happening to a lot of my friends. Everyone talks about how bad it is.”
Under the current system, would-be drivers register with a driving school. The schools offer instruction in their own classrooms (“often smelly caves,” according to Mr. Koenig) for the written test and on the road. They also determine when students can take an exam.
Since the school never has enough slots for all its students, it picks the best students first. The wait can stretch 18 months or longer. Although students are required to take only 20 hours of driving lessons, most end up doing double that while they wait for a chance to take the test.
Under the Ornikar model, students would be able to study for the written test on their own computers. They would be able to take classes from and rate licensed instructors of their choice, making their appointments online, and eliminating another one of Mr. Koenig’s frustrations: facing a constantly changing crew of instructors who trash the methods of the one before.
And the Ornikar students would be able to take advantage of a rarely used clause in the regulations that allows individuals to sign up for the exam on their own without paying a fee for that service.
It is highly unlikely that any of the students would ever go to the Ornikar office in Paris. But, the partners say, they have nonetheless met every regulation, including providing wheelchair access, a separate area for classroom study and, of course, a TV and DVD player.
But owners of other driving schools are crying foul. Philippe Colombani, the head of a union of school owners, UNIC, who works out of a storefront on the outskirts of Paris, said he was well aware of public frustration. One client set a driving school on fire a few years back. And he said a female instructor was assaulted recently.
But Ornikar, he said, was breaking the rules that everyone else had to follow. For instance, he said the regulations dictated a closed-off area for study that was accessible to people with disabilities. Ornikar, he said, did not have such an area, and its owners’ assertion that headsets would provide privacy was just not good enough.
“I have people who spend 8,000 euros on construction to make areas handicapped accessible,” he said. “What do I say to them?”
Though his first suit against Ornikar failed to shut it down, Mr. Colombani said that he would continue to challenge the Ornikar model in court over other issues, such as whether Ornikar’s use of freelance instructors was acceptable.
He, too, would like to see some changes, notably in the number of exams available, but nothing too radical because the rules, he said, “are in the interest of public safety.”
The prefecture did not reply to requests for information about its stand on Ornikar. The government has said it could not afford to expand the number of tests in a significant way, and charging a fee for this service is apparently out of the question. In France, charging for the test would be seen as giving rich people an unfair advantage, Mr. Koenig said. “Things that seem obvious elsewhere,” he said, “are not here.”
