It was really different. The cars are huge. The roads are huge. They go to school in their cars. When they are 16, they can drive! I was surprised!
~ Hortense Sussot, a student from Besançon, France, where one must be 18 to drive, after visiting Charlottesville High School in Virginia
American teenagers have long seen their first driver’s license as an important marker on the road to adulthood. For many, passing a government driving test is the ultimate 16th birthday gift. It might mean the end of riding the school bus or having a parent drive them to school.
The U.S. has a real history of “car culture.” It’s partly due to the country’s size: more than twice the size of the European Union. France, your country, would easily fit inside a large state like Texas. Driving is how many Americans visit far-flung places or relatives.
Car culture appears in some unlikely places, from drive-thru restaurants, where we can pick up french fries without unbuckling the seat belt, to the adrenaline-pumping street racing scenes of our favorite Fast & Furious movie. Cars even help many secondary schools motivate good behavior — break the rules, lose your parking privileges.
But despite all of that, Hortense, teens’ love of driving is cooling .
Nationwide, 60% of 18-year-olds had a driver’s license in 2021, down from 76% 40 years earlier, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
And, like Americans of all ages, teens are spending less time in cars, period — 20 minutes less per day than teens did a dozen years ago, according to the National Household Travel Survey.
Theories for this include the rise of ride-hailing apps and of social media, which allows teens to interact by swapping selfies from afar rather than driving to the mall after school, the way many of their parents did at that age.
Also, more and more, teens choose to walk, ride a bike, or take buses or trains to help the environment.
While Robert Foss, former director of the Center for the Study of Young Drivers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, believes the drop in teen driving is overstated, he points to “graduated” licensing systems introduced in U.S. states in the 1990s as behind the trend. These systems often require teens to drive with an adult for a set number of months and bar them from driving alone late at night or with other people in their age group in the car until they are older. “We’ve seen the effects of that play out for, well, a quarter century now,” Foss says.
Foss also suspects fewer teens are driving due to economic uncertainty during and since the Covid-19 pandemic, similar to the way fewer got licenses during and shortly after the Great Recession of 2008.
But he expects any pandemic-era decline to reverse, as it eventually did after the recession. After all, the open roads still call. And Hortense’s friends at Charlottesville High School no doubt hear the calls from local drive-thru windows, whether coffee from Starbucks, fried chicken from Raising Cane’s or the classic — french fries from McDonald’s.
By freelance writer Katherine Shaver. Staff writer Noelani Kirschner contributed.
—
Previously Published on share.america.gov
***
You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often | Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | ..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything |
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community. A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities. A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community. Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: unsplash