Other people have mentioned it, but we all remember when gas was a dollar a gallon. It was only 10-15 years ago. Gas isn’t that cheap anymore and pretending this isn’t a big deal for a kid with a minimum wage job is delusional thinking at best.
This has also been explained to you. What good does getting a license do when you can’t afford to drive? What good does getting a license do when you can’t afford to even get the license?
I work with a lot of teenagers. They are better people in almost every conceivable way than we were when I was a teen. They work harder, they’re more accepting, they’re nicer, they jump from clique to clique with an ease that I never saw. It baffles me that people constantly want to find fault in that.
Again, only one teen in a group of friends needs a license to create a strong sense of freedom in all of them.
The extra barriers–higher gas prices, fewer “teenagery” jobs, more expensive cars, and the higher age of eligibility for driving licenses found in many places–discourages even kids that are on the top of the “status” pole from driving. That trickles down to everyone else. When I was in school, the “cool” kids all had cars…which made all the other kids want to at least learn how to drive. If the cool kids are still being picked up by their parents, then the stigma of not knowing how to drive won’t be there. If your older siblings didn’t learn how to drive when they were your age, you’re not going to feel weird if you don’t learn either. My older sister ribbed me so much about not knowing how to drive when I was 15 that I believed if I didn’t get my learner’s by the time I turned 16, I’d be the laughing stock of high school.
I also wonder how the lowered employment rate for teenagers affects this. I didn’t work because I wanted a car, but having a car enabled me to work where I did. There was public transportation available, but my shift from Six Flags would frequently end in the middle of the night, when the buses stopped running (plus it wouldn’t have been safe or fun riding a bus, then a train, and then walking home at one o’clock in the morning). Take away job opportunities and the motivation to drive disappears.
Hey, I’m not criticizing today’s teens…I agree that they are better than we were at a lot of things.
But driving isn’t one of them .
one license in a group of friends may be enough for a "sense " of freedom. But it’s not the real freedom that I so cherished at age 17.
I find it odd that kids don’t need it as much as I did back then.
You don’t need a world class transit system to be able to take the bus somewhere. My sprawling suburb had exactly one bus, which came every hour or two- it went to the mall, and to the light rail that went downtown. Itd be tough for an adult with a busy schedule, a career and a lot of specific places to go. But for a kid looking to get out of the house, it was did what I needed to do.
I’m not a teen, but will turn 40 this year, and I don’t have a drivers license because my city has public transport. (Of course the situation is different in Germany because High Schools don’t offer drivers Ed.; lessons at drivers school are mandatory, so a drivers license costs easily between 2 000 and 3000 Euros all together).
That article linked to is dumb and backwards. Owning a car costs money, as others have already said: you pay not only gas, but insurance, tax, lay-back for repairs. Plus the car itself in the first place.
So if teens are poor because of the recession, getting a car may not be an option.
It’s also idiotic of the author to assert that people are risk-averse because they don’t want to spend 200$ on a bus ticket to a foreign city. Spending a lot of money to get to a city where you don’t have a place to stay or a guaranteed job is dumb and ends up with the teen sleeping under the next bridge. Staying at home with the parents and looking for a job is preferable and sensible to that.
Comparing that with the Oklahoma dust bowl people who faced starving when the farms didn’t grow anything is completly different. And even then, not everybody left for California, or Oklahoma would be empty today.
Hardly mentioned in this thread is the greater awareness of the environmental impact of individual cars. Teens are growing up conscious of their own carbon footprint, and taking public transit minimizes that.
I’m 51 and have never driven and have no desire to ever do so. I live in both Chicago (with amazing public transit) and Kansas City (with mediocre public transit). While home in Chicago, all my transit costs for a week are covered by a $23 seven day pass. There is no car that will cost that little.
I *hate *driving. I got my license when I turned 16 because I *had *to, not because I wanted to. My parents were sick of driving me around, and we had no real public transportation–so a license was an unpleasant necessity.
I now live in a town where I do not need a car, thank goodness. I might add, I am a very good driver, but I still hate it.
Lordy. I skipped school the day I turned 16 to get my learner’s permit, then did it again a few months later to get my licence. I doubt I’d have done that if graduated licences had existed.
Gas was cheap and so were used cars, and those cars could be fixed much more cheaply than they can now, if not at home then by a shop, even with inflation.
Besides, what kid now can get excited about driving a 10- or 15-year-old four-cylinder ugly and gutless econbox?
If you’re 16 or 18, which affordable used car would you want to drive? A 10-year-old Nissan or a 10-year-old 1965 Chevy Impala Super Sport? Or even a '56 Olds glinting in the sunlight like it had just robbed a silver mine, exhaust burbling* as hormones raged.
One other thing - the effort and disposable income young men used to put into hot-rodding automobiles they now put into hot-rodding computers. The modern equivalent of a hot rod deuce coupe is a computer capable of playing the current games at higher than HD resolution at a frame rate far beyond the limits of human perception.
My first thought was “The reason for the drop in 18 year olds getting them is because they’re getting them at 16”. 30 years ago, when I was the age to drive, it was a rarer thing for a teenager to actually get his or her license at 16 simply because parents weren’t going to foot the bill for the extra insurance.
So…I got my first license when I bought my first car. At 26. A full 10 years after I’d been ABLE to drive, and at least 8 years after I’d been driving regularly.
I’ve noticed the same thing as the OP. My niece was in no hurry to get a license. My daughter was in no hurry to get a license. It seemed strange.
My daughter opined that “driving was scary.” My niece’s mother thought it was good that her daughter, “realized she wasn’t mature enough to drive.”
Some possible answers:
–More kids regard smoking as dumb, and don’t want to escape the house to smoke.
–Ditto for binge drinking.
–Ditto for some drugs.
–Ditto (maybe) for backseat sex.
–Possibly parents are "cooler’ and less embarrassing than 25 years ago, and being chauffeured isn’t the stigma it once was.
–Possibly life is just more protected now. Families have one or two kids instead of four. Children grow up being more risk adverse.
–In my own situation, I learned to drive in a medium-size town with no rush hour or 65mph arteries. My daughter was facing high-speed bumper-to-bumper conditions at 17. Possibly traffic is worse now, and scarier for more kids.
You need to be 18 to get your licence here. I was 26.
The responsibility of driving awed and terrified me. Several people I’d known from school were killed in car accidents in the few years around my 18th birthday and this further unnerved me. I also had an impromptu late night driving lesson from a friend that didn’t go well and reinforced my fears that driving wasn’t for me.
Eventually I felt less intimidated by the idea of learning to drive, and with my job and my husband both encouraging me, I did learn. A major motivation was wanting to be off my three-year probationary licence before I turned 30. I made it with four months to spare.
From 1946 to 1972 gas prices drifted down from $2.50/gallon to $2/gallon.
From 1973 to 1984 they went from $2.50 to $3.30, and then dropped back to $2.50.
From 1985 to 2004 prices went from $2 to $1.50 and then back to $2.
From 2005 to 2012 prices went from $2.50 to $3.30 to $2.50 to $3.30.
So, compare to '85-2004, gas is now about twice as much.
I had trouble finding info on average mpg of US cars, but it seems to have gone form maybe 17 in 1984 to 23 in 2012. And today it’s not hard to get a 35 mpg vehicle if you’re so inclined. Still compared to the early 2000s, it’s expensive to drive.
This is a pretty fascinating thread; my middle-aged mind says, “Well, of course you need to learn to drive,” then I think about it and realize that maybe you don’t (the case of cursive writing going extinct also comes to mind). My niece is 17 and she is also not keen on driving (you can start your graduated license at 16 here). I thought it was just her, but it doesn’t sound like it.
I think economic conditions are also making kids are less interested in working a McJob to pay off their car so they can go wandering around aimlessly with their buddies causing trouble.
In the 1970s, middle class kids could generally expect to remain middle class, as long as they didn’t screw up too bad. They could see that in a few years they would be homeowners, starting families, and putting in time at a job they’d expect to hold until retirement. It seemed okay to spend some time screwing around.
It’s not like that now. The middle class has shrunk, and America is not longer secure that it’s the top of the heap. Kids need to go to university to have any hope of becoming middle class, and university admissions are getting more and more competitive. Careers are more complicated and less stable. Family life and property ownership are coming into the picture much later in life. Working a dead-end job and spending the rest of your time “hanging out” is a recipe for becoming a community-college dropout working in retail.
SO I think kids do more constructive activities, and that leaves less time for earning money to pay for a relatively unnecessary big-ticket item, and it leave less time to enjoy said item. And I wouldn’t take that to mean that kids are all mindless college-app grubbing automatons. I think a lot of them are doing really cool things- making movies, getting engaged in real community service, doing cool internships, travelling abroad, etc.
My daughter had no desire to learn to drive, failed her driver’s test twice, and finally grudgingly got her license only because a decline in public transit meant her 6 mile trip to a local college would take 2 1/2 hours waiting for bus transfers. Ten years later she paid cash for her own car but doesn’t want to drive at night, on unfamiliar routes, or on highways. She deliberately takes a longer route to work so she can stay on city streets.
One thing that has been mentioned only in passing is that the laws have been changed in many states so that teenage driving is not nearly as much “fun” as it used to be.
One of the main things we used to do when I was a teen was get together a bunch of friends and drive around late at night. That’s all illegal now in California.
For a significant period, new teenage drivers cannot have as passengers other (non-related) minor passengers, and there are also strict curfews.
So some of the incentive for getting a license really young is gone.
My teenage nephew shows little to no interest in learning how to drive, in spite of the fact that he is old enough. I find it curious, and am glad to hear in this thread that it is not as unusual as I thought it was. Still, my sister was (and I guess, still is) a helicopter parent, chauffeuring my nephews around, wherever they need to go. I don’t think they have ever taken a bus or subway by themselves; which I find odd, as my sister and I were travelling buses and subways by ourselves when we were younger than my nephews are now.
Maybe the fact that my sister is always willing to drive “Mom’s Taxi” has something to do with it (unlike my experience, where I was told to take public transit). Anyway, if you’ve always got a ride, why bother learning how to drive?
It’s just a jump to the left… And then a step to the right.
but I digress, to the op. I think it’s an interesting social phenomena. When I was a kid, driving at 16 was as common as breathing. I literally did not know of anybody in my school who didn’t have their license at that age short of failing the test. It would have been a major embarrassment. And as an aside, most of the kids had to buy their own cars.
And as far as the Ohio law limiting it to 1 passenger, that just means more cars on the road with kids texting. :rolleyes:
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