I have a few friends in their late 20s-30s who can’t drive. I think all of them, at one point or another, have had difficulty finding work, or good jobs, because didn’t have reliable means to get to work. It can take a long time to pass the test here, it’s not easy, and also has 2 components, theory, which must be done first, and practical, both of which may need booking weeks in advance to get a test slot. When you’re a teenager, you may be able to get parents to drop you off and pick you up from work, but when you’re 30…?
In the UK at least, you can get a driving licence then simply not use it, and it doesn’t expire for decades; you have to pay a small fee for updating the picture every 10 years or something, but that’s the only cost of holding it. It’s not cheap to get, but it’s unlikely to get cheaper or easier- unless it all goes to self-driving cars, of course. Getting the licence ASAP may seem like a bit of a waste of money, but trying to get a licence AND a car when you need one is likely to wind up way more expensive.
A co-worker described her teenage daughter and her friends using Uber/Lyft to get where they wanted to go. They split the cost of the service, so it was affordable even on their budget. So these types of services reduce the pressure on kids to learn to drive.
And when I was young a big disincentive to getting your license was the increased cost of auto insurance. I don’t know exact numbers but my father was concerned about how much his premiums would rise.
As mentioned, there might be advantages to not owning a car. There are no advantages to not knowing how to drive. There’s seldom an advantage to having less knowledge and fewer skills to do potentially good and useful things rather than more, and knowing how to drive is not one of the rare exceptions.
On ‘pressure’, almost anything that’s common to do creates some social pressure to also do it. ‘Be like everyone else’ is a basic driver of behavior to varying degrees in everyone. However thinking to when I turned 17 (when we could first get any kind of license in my state then) I really wanted it. I did not consciously feel external pressure at all. Anecdotally in line with statistics, my kids were not as worked up about it, got their licenses gradually at 18-19 or so IIRC when they got around to it. They did grow up in a dense urban area and me in the suburbs, but times have changed generally on that it seems.
Living right next to NY we know middle age and older people who never learned to drive. It’s not that rare around here. A friend in 60’s is now dealing with getting a very sick spouse to medical providers, grew up in Manhattan never learned to drive, not ideal now. Even right outside Manhattan driving might be the best way to get to a medical appointment with a sick person. Fortunately Uber etc makes it less a problem than it would have been.
At least in the US, a LOT depends on where exactly you live. I could likely get around completely fine without driving in New York. I don’t live in NY though - I live in a medium-sized Midwestern town that can’t really justify a lot of public transportation. I can usually Uber if I need to, but that’d get expensive, and I’d have to constantly worry if I will be able to find a ride or not. So here, you’re fully expected to learn to drive, and if you refuse, it’s seen as pretty odd (I’ve known all of two people, both older women, who refuse to ever drive).
As for when you can start learning, again, it depends on where you live. Not even the state necessarily, but rural or urban. Farm kids will often learn to drive pretty young, since there are hardly any other cars on the road and their parents need the labor. I was never a farm kid, so for me, driving started at age 14, when I got my learner’s permit. That allowed me to attend driver’s ed (which I did through my high school), and drive with a parent in the car. I completed all requirements by 16 and got my full license. Meanwhile, my best friend in another state never took driver’s ed. She learned to drive solely with her parents, and got her license when she became a legal adult.
Whether someone SHOULD learn to drive is ultimately up to them. I think people more or less have a responsibility to be as little a burden to others as possible. That said, there are always going to be exceptions. My friend who learned later than I did also lives in a MUCH larger city, with more public transportation options, and extended family nearby. Whereas I absolutely needed a car in high school to get to my part-time job. And there will always be someone who is extremely stressed by driving, to the point where it does more harm to have them behind the wheel than it would benefit them.
There are definite advantages to not owning a car, especially in a huge city. You tend to lose many of those advantages as you venture to less populated areas, though.
I wouldn’t say it’s difficult to learn, necessarily. Just that there’s a LOT to it, and you’ll likely be adding bits and pieces of knowledge pertaining to driving throughout your entire life.
I’m 31, and have been driving since I was 14 (got my full license at 16). There are still little things I learn to this day, but overall I’ve found driving to be fairly easy. I take things slow and if I’m unsure, I back off and just be careful. I’m also not afraid to ask others if there’s something I’m not sure about (stopped behind a school bus awhile back that was stopped near kids, but no one was getting on or off, and there was no stop sign out (only the brake lights). I did eventually slooooooowly make my way around the bus, as there were other cars behind me as well, but asked my dad when I got home if that was the right thing to do or not. I also only recently learned how to really use cruise control, and was able to use it the whole 4 hr drive to Kansas City with friends. Stuff like that.
This x100. I just couldn’t imagine not wanting to drive. Still can’t really. But I’ve never lived anywhere where their was good public transport. If you wanted to do pretty much anything, you had to drive.
Yeah. I got my drivers license in the early 90s when I was 16. Had my permit at 15, of course. This was pretty much standard for all my peers. There wasn’t any pressure that I remember – it was something we all wanted to do.
These days, I hear about a lot of kids getting their licenses later (as kenobi’s link confirms.) To me, it was inconceivable to want to delay getting your DL for any reason. I don’t think it was until I was in my mid-late-20s that I knowingly met someone who didn’t have a DL. That was just unconceivable to me at the time. Now, it doesn’t seem as odd.
So, yeah, it feels like, if anything, from my perspective and my locality, there’s been less social expectation of getting a license now than there was back in the 90s.
My daughters will be pressured to drive at least by their parents. The rides to school stop as soon as they are old enough to drive. The high school is 3 miles away down the highway so bikes aren’t an option, there is no bus or any kind of public transportation in our town. If they want to go to the good high school it is either 17 miles or 21 miles depending if they want public or private.
Of course the world will probably change in the next 11 years when the first one can drive and maybe civilization will make it out to our town. Then again, if it does we’ll probably move farther away.
When I was in high school, in the early 1970’s, you were given a drivers ed course when you were 15. I’m not even sure if it was optional, I don’t know anyone that didn’t take it. The classes were scheduled by birth date and aligned so you would be eligible for your learners permit right after you passed the class.
Then you went to the DMV and got your license, usually on your 16th birthday. It was pretty much a rite of passage.
This was in a mid-sized town in the South.
Then I moved to New York City in my early twenties. Most of my new friends that were local to the area didn’t even know how to drive. I sold my car before I moved and didn’t drive at all for something like 12 years, although I kept my license current.
But I needed to drive sometimes for work, so my employer gifted me his old car. After that, I always kept a car in the city, although I didn’t drive nearly as much as non-city dwellers. I probably averaged 2500 miles per year. And I still know highly paid professionals in their 50’s, born and raised in NY, that can’t drive.
Like myself, but I was 16 in 1976. We lived out in the country. I learned to drive when I was about 12. Getting my license was a snap since I had already been driving for about 4 years.
I believe the OP is inquiring from the UK. This changes the dynamic of the question quite a bit. Although the situation is slowing changing, the vast majority of cars in the UK have manual transmissions. And when a driver in the US remembers how easy it was to learn “how to drive”, the vast majority of these individuals learned to drive in an automatic transmission vehicle.
When US drivers (both young & old) remember learning about steering, braking, mirrors, signaling, stop lights & signs and generally the “rules” of the road", they did NOT have to think about a third pedal and trying to synchronize the clutch with the accelerator pedal while at the same time still concentrating on everything else. I believe the (vast?) majority of US drivers at any age do not know how to drive a “stick”. And if they do know how to drive a stick, they learned AFTER they were comfortable driving an automatic.
I got my license in the mid-1970s in Connecticut, where, at 15, you could drive without a license as long as a licensed adult was in the car with you, and you could get a full license at 16 after passing the test. (At the time, my parents had a manual, so I learned to drive stick from the start.) As others have said, pretty much everyone got a license as soon as they could because it was the only way to socialize with your friends without a parent driving you – mortifying at that age. It wasn’t pressure so much as an emotional necessity.
My two kids got their licenses 5 years apart in the late 2000s/mid 2010s. The older one was champing at the bit to get a license, but I think that had partly to do with anxiety over being in a car with someone else driving. Also, at the time she wasn’t communicating much via social media with local friends, internet friends were scattered around the country.
My younger kid spent a lot more time on the internet communicating with local friends, and was really uninterested in driving. I don’t think he saw a strong need for it and got his license more to have the ID than the license itself. He’s hardly driven since and doesn’t really need to, living in Boston now. Did we pressure him to get his license? A bit, perhaps.
And it really does depend heavily on location. On Long Island, where I am, you really need to drive to get around, as public transportation consists of inconvenient buses and the Long Island Rail Road, which is geared to getting people in and out of NY City, not getting them from place to place on the Island.
But I knew people who grew up in NYC and never learned to drive. Owning a car there can be more trouble than it’s worth. Similarly, when I lived in Boston (Cambridge, actually), one of the first things I did was to sell my car because I didn’t need it. One of the first things I did on moving to Long Island was to buy one.
Started driving a car when I was 10 (Grandpa had a farm). It was a manual. I had driven several tractors prior to that. I got my license when I was 16 years, one month, and one day of age (the earliest possible). Drove a stick without giving it a second thought. My primary car was a stick until probably into my 30’s.
My kids also got their licenses on the first day possible. It was always an exciting time and not anything any of them considered a chore and barring any emergency would not have delayed by a day. They can all drive sticks.
Wow. Where did you live and when were you 30? I assume it was in a country with a lot less demand due to far more robust public transportation but even so that’s five times as much as it cost my parents for me to take it in New Hampshire in 93.
That is certainly true for me. I don’t know if I’d make the assumption that those who learned stick learned after they were comfortable driving an automatic. While that was true in my case, most of the people I know who drive/drove manual transmission learned it first (and people in rural areas were far more likely to know how to drive a stick than us city folk.)
As for overall numbers, what I see is that about 1/5th of Americans can drive stick. That sounds about right to me, but it will vary by region, like I said above. In the city, I’m sure the numbers are a good bit lower than that. I’ve been in a couple of situations where I needed someone to drive my car, and in a group of 10-20 people, nobody was at least willing to admit to being able to drive a stick.
But, yes, I could see the introduction of the complication of a third pedal to perhaps cause a %age of the population to hesitate or be somewhat dissuaded from getting a license. (On the other hand, with the culture as it was here growing up, I don’t think it would make much of a difference if we had to learn to drive stick. We’d all be happy to learn.)