23, no license, I live in a city with public transit; gas and insurance are expensive and there is no place to park.
Almost all of my sexual experiences, and the partner I’m living with, can be directly or indirectly attributed to computer gaming. 
I got a head start on this trend. I’m 32 and still haven’t gotten a license. I’ve had a few learner’s permits over the years, and I know -how- to drive, which so far has proven about as useful as my knowledge of how to land a plane by ILS. Should the time come that I have a reason to own a car, I’ll go to the bother, but that time hasn’t come yet.
I’m baffled by those of you that are baffled by it. Why should I care about driving? I’ve socialized almost entirely online since I was 14. There’s no point to drive somewhere to “hang out” when you can do the exact same purposeless conversation from the comfort of home, and with anyone in the world, besides. In both cities I’ve lived in, the time needed for daily commute with public transit has been comparable or superior to doing it via personal car. I’ve lived within walking distance of the only services (grocery and banking) that I need regularly outside of daily commuting. Any task that requires a vehicle, such as a furniture purchase, is infrequent enough that the additional hassle of having to enlist a friend or family with a vehicle is of no concern. If I want to travel, at even just two or three states away, it becomes more affordable to fly than to drive…and flying doesn’t waste half a day on mind-numbing tedium.
It’s not the 50s anymore, except for the occasional gear-head, nobody has a romantic image of the auto. A car is just like any other mundane tool, except for being extremely expensive to own and operate. You need a lot of disposable income before the cost to benefit ratio starts to look justifiable, and the job market for teens (or heck, for many people, period) doesn’t provide an awful lot of that.
It is strange to me too (and I’m not from the suburbs). However, necessity is a good motivator. Maybe kids didn’t have the pressure to learn to drive like they did “back in the day”, but that doesn’t mean the pressure won’t hit them when they graduate from college. Maybe college has prolonged adolescence in such a way that the driving “rite of passage” simply happens later in life. If so, I don’t think this is so bad. It means fewer kids on the road, but more responsible “young adults”.
I think there are a lot of variables that determine why the current younger generation does not feel the urge to obtain a DL. A quick couple of reasons.
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Social interactions have changed. Before social media, if you wanted to interact with other peers, you needed to be there in person. Now you can interact with friends online and surf the internet at the same time. This removes much of the ‘boredom factor’ and allows you to stay at home but still feel connected. In fact not having virtual social interactions is outside the cultural norm. There is really no reason to need a vehicle, in this framework.
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Costs are much higher to drive today, then even 10 years ago, and much more expensive than 20 years ago. Insurance for a male driver is easily in the 200-400 dollar range per month. Add high gas prices and lack of affordable vehicles, easy to see why limited high school expenditures go elsewhere.
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Availability of mass transit. Public transit has grown and public perception has changed. It used to be riding the bus was not cool, now it is much more accepted.
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I also think this teens not wanting DL is just a continuation of the evolving way teens/young adults grow into adulthood in mainstream USA. It seems as a society we have accepted that young adults can live at home after 18 now. The sense of urgency is no longer as crushing to find a long term career or go to college. The milestones are no longer set in stone, or even carry any significance.
Blows me away too. But then I’ve never lived in a place with good public transit. And grew up before all of the social networking on the computer. Not going out with friends, and just texting or whatever just isn’t the same. Seems kind of sad.
What about road trips? I’ve been going on them since I was 17. It’s a great way to develop independence and see the country.
Currently I absolutely must have a car to get around. I don’t live in a town and I prefer it that way.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it the policy of most hotels not to rent a room to anyone under 21? Or at very least, the renter must have a major credit card, which excludes a lot of 18-21 year olds.
Camped mostly. Though things may have been a bit different back in the 70’s. I could also stay with friends or family.
Anyway, I did have a CC. My name on the card. My Moms account. Heh. Still have one for when my Mom wants me to buy her something.
I know a couple of times I just drove straight through from Denver to central Illinois. Either with my brother or a friend as an extra driver.
Anyway, I was also addressing those older folks that still don’t have a DL. Just sort of surprises me.
I saved my summer job money and spent it backpacking through Europe as a teen. Since then I’ve mostly travelled internationally- 20 some odd countries so far. I did take Amtrak from SC to NYC once. Quite an experience.
Non drivers have different experiences, not fewer or less rich ones.
The thing that got me driving was helping my father drive whenever the family visited relatives every year. It was a long trip (12-14 hours), and so as soon as I got my learner’s, I was roped into helping out. I can’t imagine him not forcing any of his kids to take the wheel for him. In his eyes, learning to drive was like learning how to ride a bicycle.
I think walking a lot opens your eyes to little details about town. I know stuff that other people don’t know about because they’re always speeding around in cars. But cars also give you a different perspective. I don’t think I would know anything about the places outside of the city proper if I didn’t have a car. Sometimes that kind of information comes in handy.
I’d say they do; drivers’ experiences don’t preclude those of non-drivers.
But the non-drivers are still doing something. Everyone is still having experiences. And it’s not like a non-driver can’t ever learn to drive. If I ever got it into my head that I wanted to take a road trip, I can learn to drive quite easily. Non-drivers do different stuff, but it’s not worse.
Even if that wasn’t true, I still disagree. The US Government Department of Labor Statistics estimates it costs the average car owner around $8,000 a year to own a car. There are a lot of things you can do with an extra $8,000 in discretionary income. In my cast, having that extra money is almost certainly what has allowed me to spend my summers doing stuff like floating down the Zambezi and trekking through Mongolia. I’m not “lucky” to be able to travel. I have made choices that enable that, and one is choosing to make choices that enable me to live without a car.
And this is where the slippery stuff comes in. Today was a gorgeous day, so I walked the five miles home from school- and it was a nice walk with lots of adventures. Could i have done that with a car? Sure, though it’d take some advance planning. Would I have? Almost certainly not. When you have a car, it makes it very easy to make choices that trap you into needing a car. You figure it’s okay to live a bit far from the bus line because your new house has so much room. You choose to commute rather than move when you get a new job, because moving is such a pain. Pretty soon, you end up unable to contemplate walking a half-mile. I think it would take extraordinary discipline to stay as active as I do if I had a car- and that is discipline I don’t personally have.
Aren’t you equally “trapped” by not having a car? You are limited in where you can be employed and where you can find housing based on what is near public transportation.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Yes, you could learn to drive - but you may never develop the same level of comfort and confidence behind the wheel that people who learned as teens generally possess. The sense of caution that most people develop when they enter their 20s, though good in most respects, seems to make it tougher to learn to drive well.
(And yes, I speak from experience. I did get my license when I was 16, but I did no real driving until my late 20s - and I’ve never become comfortable in heavy, fast-moving traffic, despite having been driving quite regularly for 20 years now. And the half-dozen or so people I know who also learned to drive late are the same.)
I read just the first page of this thread, so may offer nothing new here, but anyway:
All this talk about licenses, cars, insurances and gas being more expensive now than before: where I live, a mandatory driver’s education course costs around 1500 euros total (2000 USD), while gas is 1.6 euros per liter, or 8.4 USD / gallon. An affordable 10-year-old used car goes for around 2000 euros (or you can buy a 500-euro beater and spend 1500 on repairs). Add insurance, and you’ll need some serious moolah to get behind a steering wheel.
I didn’t have near that kind of money as a teenager, and only really did when I was past 30. Even now, keeping and using a car is so expensive I can’t justify it.
My response to this is that it’s always better to have choices.
I live in the city, so I avail myself of the sidewalk and the bus whenever possible. I do so because I choose to. I also have a car, so that if circumstances arise where I have to move (my job transfers me, I find the perfect place just outside the reach of transit, I become disabled, etc.), then I don’t find myself in a crisis.
It’s not an either/or thing when you can drive and afford a car.
I’m not issuing a judgement on anyone’s lifestyle. I like that there are people that are self-sufficient enough where a car is an unnecessary and I wish more places were set-up so that this was the norm. But I have to say…for every person rafting down the Nile River (or whatever your adventure of choice), there’s two of them who never go anywhere unless someone else is ferrying them around and who cannot grab any opportunity that comes their way for the lack of independent transportation. Just staying an hour late at work becomes a hardship if the buses stop running after a certain time. There’s no way you can seriously argue that having a car reduces one’s flexibility in life. It can be if it’s a financial hardship, but for many folks, that hardship is balanced out by the opportunities having wheels bring.
I don’t spend anywhere close to $8000. It’s an expense to keep a car, but if you rely on other means of transportation in addition to driving, the cost goes down considerably.
Something I’m seeing in this thread is that many of the respondents appear to equate “getting a license” with “getting a car”. In Spain it’s very common to get a license as soon as legally possible but not get a car.
I got my license years before needing or getting a car. That way, if I’d gone somewhere by car and the driver got sick, we got an alternate driver. Same for Littlebro; Middlebro actually needed a car, his college town being two inches to the left of the middle of nowhere.
My Big City cousin got her license in her 40s: her boyfriend is a diabetic and has a car and they often drive on day trips, so again it was a matter of having a second driver available if the driver gets sick. She doesn’t own a car nor plan on getting one; both of them use public transportation to go to work.
Key Word: AVERAGE
All the people with 50-100 mile commutes are dragging the average up for the rest of us. After gas, maintenance, and repairs, I’d say I pay roughly $2500 for my car a year. What I mean is it’s a rather meaningless statistic to cite as people’s experiences with their cars will differ so greatly.
But that only works if you live in the countryside and get regular driving practise.
I live in a big city with heavy traffic. When I considered getting my license several years back for the few cases I might need it, I decided against it because driving once every four months or so is not enough practise to drive safely in heavy traffic, and renting a car every month just to get practise is too expensive.
It’s kind of a moot point for me since I must have a car due to where I have chosen to live.
Anyway, while a person may have adventures while walking home, what’s to say the person driving doesn’t also enrich their life by having more time to do things that they want to do? I have recently taken up the banjo. If I had to spend an extra hour a day commuting, it would be very difficult for me to find the time to play.
I feel like I’m the only one that actually noticed the numbers in the OP. It went from 80% to 65%, or from “Most have licenses, but sizable chunk doesn’t,” to “Most have licenses, but a sizable chunk doesn’t.” So back then, an additional 1 in 7 kids could drive.
Why are posters acting like this is some gigantic change worthy of a “kids these days” discussion? All the reasons mentioned sound like enough to cause the tiny, incidental 15% decrease.