What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?

https://kyu.de/post/1055442

What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad? - kyu

I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming. Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.

Winter driving and shoulder season driving. Snow, ice, black ice, freezing rain, slush, hydroplaning, driveway clearing, walkway maintenance, windshield scraping, and keeping an emergency kit for breakdowns. Stuff like that.

Or driving in general. As an American who didn't get a driver's license until I was 21 due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can't comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn't know how to use a passport as an ID.

The only other people I've met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem... the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like "simply drive to your driving test appointment"...

As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old)

I’m now 41, never made a license - there wasn’t really much of a need until now. I can get anywhere I want with a combination of bicycle and public transport.

Guessing you live in or close-ish some kind of urban center? I got my license at 18 cause the closest bus stop from my parents’ place was a 30 minute walk from the closest bus stop, getting literally anywhere useful was at the very minimum another 30 minutes on top of this, and getting downtown was another 45-50 minutes of bus+metro over those last two stretches, assuming no traffic. I currently live 60km outside of town, it’s the exact same story. North America was built for cars, for better or (especially) for worse.

When I moved out of my parents’ place and got an apartment in the city with my wife though, we managed without a car. Bus/metro/walking got us everywhere we needed for every day life, and we used car sharing services when we needed to go out of town.

North America was built by the train, it was later destroyed for the car.