Yes, the 3rd Directive licensing is still coming
January 19th 2013, it's done, dusted and legislated.
To be honest, I also preferred the 2 part test, but that's because I was sitting on my own 125 and the site was fairly local. It lets you get the opportunity for silly foot-down fails out of the way for £15.50.
However, its different if you're paying bike hire to a training school, or need to travel a long way: costs can quickly ramp up. There's also something rotten in the state of the module 1 test, since the pass rate for men is nudging 70% but for women it remains in the mid 40s. In module 2, the female pass rate is marginally higher than for men, so it's not that they can't ride bikes.
But the most significant factor is that when the new 2 part test came in, the number of newly licensed bikers (literally) halved, and has only recently started a slow rise again. That happened at the same time as the economy tanked, and the result was a catastrophic fall in sales with loads of dealer casualties that aren't done yet by a long shot. The bikes that are being sold are overwhelmingly 125s going to perpetual L platers, or litre+ bikes going to geezers. That's not a basis for a healthy industry.
All this came about because the cretins in charge when the 2nd Directive was implemented apparently didn't realise that 50kph is more than 30mph, and then they went and gold plated the hell out of the required test elements like good little OCD spackers, making it appear much harder and more burdensome than it really is. It's not a hard test, it just puts people off even trying.
Penning, bless him, just sacked off that 50kph limit and said 48kph (= 30mph) is good enough for a pass. Shut up, that's why. And he was pushing to get it all back on road again, none of this cones and speed gates bollocks - examiners can and must use their judgement for every other aspect of the test - they can say "Go on, swerve around that manhole cover" and judge 'fast enough' by eye.
Now that Penning been ousted, I imagine the Sir Humphreys will bury the review and assure us that everything will be just fine the way it is. It's not, but that's a rant for a 3rd Directive thread.
