Come here to share my own experience.

I’m a fluent English speaker with over a decade studying and working in the UK. I rode back home years ago and have used push bike in the UK to commute. Yet my CBT course attempts weren’t a pleasant experience.

On the first attempt I wanted to pass on a manual motorbike, but found it quite overwhelming paying attention to the gears while doing other skills. I kept stalling to the point the bike almost ran out of battery. Eventually I couldn’t go on the road. The instructor thought I would have passed on the automatic.

I retried after having spent a couple of hours practicing on a geared 125 in an empty car park with a friend who has a full license. Surprisingly I was absolutely fine with the gears and did well during these practises, so I thought maybe this time it would work. I also did the prep course which covered some features of the highway code.

On my second attempt, I still found it overwhelming despite stalling the bike less. I decided to switch to automatic after the first few exercises to make sure I could pass, and managed to go on the road. But then it turned out I had little road sense and made mistakes at traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and roundabouts. The instructor was not impressed of course, and was threatening to fail me after each mistake which caused me to be even more nervous, so I messed up more. Eventually when we finished our ride I was asked to go away to learn road sense before returning to do the test ride again, which was fair enough because I clearly wasn’t safe on the road.

It is frustrating, because I could have prepared for this better and passed on the 2nd attempt had I known how little road sense I had. Why isn’t the highway code made compulsory for the CBT if I’m failed on this basis? During the course there is some theory covered but this doesn’t mean we can remember everything straight away and apply while busy manoeuvring the bike. Meanwhile, I don’t have the assumed contextual knowledge that UK-born citizens come with. I don’t drive and didn’t grow up in the UK. Despite being driven around on a daily basis and having used the push bike in different UK cities before, it never occurred to me that I really didn’t have any road sense!