Tiered Licenses

Truck drivers need a commercial driving license, for normal motorists there is no need for such a license. This shouldn’t be surprising because tiered licensing is actually very common when it comes to transportation. Chicago, IL is on the great lakes, a great many people boat there, but it’s not quite the same level of boating as a coastal state. A lot of that’s down to the shape of Illinois where very little of the state is actually coastal, and it’s in a very wintery area where boating isn’t very appealing for vast portions of the year. In short it’s understandable that someone in Illinois, even the coastal area around Chicago might not know that boating licenses are typically tiered, airplane licenses are tiered as well.

When the size of a vehicle changes the dynamics of how it handles changes with it. Motorcycles require different licenses in many states because they drive so unlike cars. A commercial driving license is required because the massive trucks handle so very differently than passenger cars. It can be difficult to go from a pickup truck to a compact car, let alone from a compact to a commercial truck. Boats are tiered as well. Personal water craft, Jet Ski and the like, are very fast and agile, but have different boating rules. Larger sea-craft have different rules and laws they have to follow, and then there are the vessels large enough to require a captain’s license because everything gets different over the length of 65 feet.

Air craft have so many tiers of licensing that it’s not worth going into the minutia here. What actually stands out most of all is that the licensing is not abusive. There have been criticisms of some licensing processes as just being an attempt to limit market entrants or distort a market, in the case of licenses like a commercial driving license it’s an important check to have. Commercial trucks, large sea craft, and commercial airliners, all need different rules and regulations than smaller vessels; they carry a much larger inherent risk. They handle very differently than their smaller brethren, and they need to be treated differently by the law. When someone gets into a commercial truck near a major city like Chicago, IL the other drivers will be glad to know that the person behind the wheel had to go through a process of learning how to handle the vehicle, that they’ve gotten a commercial driving license because a bad driver in one of those can do a lot of damage. The same is true for boaters when it comes to larger yachts, having to share the water and channels with them is only acceptable because the captains are well trained (usually) and know what they’re doing.