> think the point is that depending on circumstances you can spend either 45 minutes driving down a more or less empty road or 45 minutes in rush hour traffic

> think the point is that depending on circumstances you can spend either 45 minutes driving down a more or less empty road or 45 minutes in rush hour traffic and it's basically impossible to judge someone equally in those two cases But you're highly unlikely to find a UK test centre where the routes consist of more or less empty roads (UK population is not distributed like Sweden's) > Exactly! And that is why it is important that we make sure everybody gets tested on that before we give them a license. The test isn't to ensure that they consistently handle weird behaviour from other drivers or oddly laid out junctions flawlessly (experienced drivers don't either). If we expected that, nobody would ever drive at all, at least not without thousands of hours in a simulator. It's to ensure their approaches to junctions are at sensible speeds and they pay attention to what's going on and use mirrors and signals. You can do that in high traffic or low traffic, and it's by no means certain that the low traffic conditions would more favourable to you anyway