For generations of American teenagers, obtaining a driver’s license was a rite of passage. But when Jonathan Golden, a scruffy-haired high schooler who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., turned 16 in November, he couldn’t be bothered with the bureaucracy of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Instead, he wanted his own Uber account.
That way, he could do normal teenage things like meeting friends at the mall, going to the movies or coming home from school without having to call his parents. He was also open to the idea of picking up a date in an Uber, though he says he doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment.
“It’s like you’re being driven around by your parents, but you don’t have to hold a conversation with them,” he said.
While Jonathan may be an early adopter, he said that most of his friends don’t have a license or car, either. Often they share Uber rides, using the app’s built-in fare-splitting feature, for after-school outings and weekend hangouts.
The lack of excitement about driving among teenagers is not unique to Jonathan and his friends, but points to a growing cultural shift.
In recent years, there has been a considerable decline in the percentage of teenagers with a driver’s license, according to Brandon Schoettle, a project manager at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, who has studied the decline with Michael Sivak. In one study, they found that the ranks of 16-year-olds in the United States with a driver’s license had fallen to 28 percent in 2010, from 46 percent in 1983.
Mr. Schoettle said that while the number of licensed teenagers has started to level off in some areas (though rising slightly in a select few), there are many reasons that teenagers are choosing not to get a license, including the advent of ride-sharing apps.
“Having the convenience of Lyft and Uber probably outweighs the money and cost of owning a vehicle,” Mr. Schoettle said in a phone interview. “The cellphone also makes it so much more convenient to get a ride from a friend or taxi service.”
There are also financial considerations. While AAA estimates that the cost of owning a car has fallen in recent years, maintenance, registration fees, insurance and gas quickly add up to thousands of dollars. (And if you’re like me, there are also parking tickets to pay.)
Enter the ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, which are often cheaper and more efficient than owning a car.
But there are drawbacks to this decline in car culture. Jonathan, for example, would miss out on the bonding experience of having his father teach him how to drive (though they did bond over the pitfalls of Uber “surge pricing,” his father, Eric Golden, told me).
And there are those nostalgic teenage moments like driving around with friends and singing to the radio, sitting on your trunk in an empty parking lot, or making out with someone in the back of the car.
But for Mr. Golden, 46, an entrepreneurial executive, those cultural losses are outweighed by the safety advantages. “I kept pushing my son, saying ‘Don’t you want to learn how to drive?’ and he’d say, ‘Maybe, but not right now,’ ” Mr. Golden said. “Then it occurred to me: Why am I pushing him so hard? An Uber is going to be so much safer than a 16-year-old behind the wheel.”
He’s right. According to federal statistics that were published in April 2014, 1,875 drivers age 15 to 20 died in car crashes in 2012. An additional 184,000 young drivers were injured that year. (The good news: Young driver fatalities and accidents are on the decline from previous years.)
A report released last month by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a nonprofit research group, found that 6 out of 10 car accidents involving teenagers were a result of being distracted while driving.
Numbers like that frighten me when I think about my own soon-to-be-born son growing up and getting behind the wheel, especially after what I witnessed during my own high school years. In the early 1990s, five of my classmates were killed in a car race near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with one car plunging into a canal. (And that was not the last fatal car accident that occurred in high school, either.)
Moreover, there were occasions when I almost totaled my own car, being too immature and stupid to recognize the potential consequences of driving too fast.
But does the gain in traffic safety come at the loss of independence? Yes and no, said Amanda Lenhart, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, who focuses on teenagers. While teenagers may be less free to move around and explore, she said, the independence that a driver’s license once symbolized has been replaced by the cellphone.
“Young people wouldn’t delay getting their license if they felt that it was critical to them as a talisman for freedom and independence,” Ms. Lenhart said.
All of this may be moot a decade from now, as technology not only upends car culture, but driving itself.
Mr. Golden, who also has a 13-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, said that by the time his youngest turns 16, a driver’s license could be obsolete. “My hope is that before the 7-year-old needs to learn how to drive, cars will be self-driving,” Mr. Golden said.
And if they’re not, his youngest can always split the cost of an Uber with his older brother.
British Teenagers
A study found that young people were ditching car ownership because of internet shopping, taxi-sharing apps and better public transport.
The fall was also attributed to the escalating cost of insurance for young people, with some being quoted almost £5,400 a year for comprehensive cover.
Older drivers, meanwhile, are hanging on to their cars to “preserve their independence”.
The conclusions are made in a report from the Independent Transport Commission, alongside the Office of Rail and Road, into attitudes towards different forms of transport.
It follows the publication of statistics from the Department for Transport showing that the proportion of 17 to 20-year-olds with a driving licence has dipped over the past two decades. In 2013, 31 per cent held a licence, compared with almost half in 1992. Among over-70s, the proportion of driving-licence holders had risen from 33 per cent to 62 per cent. In the mid-1970s it was 15 per cent.
“The research demonstrates that young people are ‘falling out of love’ with the car, and place greater weight on alternative consumer products, while older people see the car as an important part of their lifestyle,” the commission’s study said.
Researchers interviewed almost 4,700 people for the report, which sought to set out the factors behind changing travel trends.
They found examples of young people being quoted huge amounts for insurance. One 20-year-old, a Post Office worker from Manchester, said that he was quoted £5,394 for comprehensive car insurance.
In urban areas, the researchers found that pensioners often owned a car but were less likely to rely on them as they used free bus passes and senior rail discounts.
Phones Before Cars
It's been a trend for years: young people are driving less. It's been blamed on the economy, on higher insurance costs, on congestion, but some think that it is because of the smart phone, and the desire to be connected.
For most Gen Y buyers, also known as Millennials, skipping a vehicle purchase is preferable to forgoing technology.
Smartphones, laptops and tablet devices compete for their dollars and are higher priorities than vehicle purchases, said Joe Vitale, an automotive consultant with Deloitte. Financing, parking, servicing and insuring a vehicle all add up to a commitment that cash-strapped Millennials aren’t ready to make, he said. “A vehicle is really a discretionary purchase and a secondary need versus an iPhone, mobile phone or personal computer,”.
Now a new study concludes that smartphones are having a real impact on transit use. DePaul University's Chaddick Institute of Metropolitan Development (PDF here) studied the Chicago transit system and found that over 56 percent of riders were using some form of technology while traveling this year, three times as many as five years ago. They were mostly doing things that are illegal in the driver's seat of a car: reading, shipping online and using social media. They correlate this to the significant increase in transit use in the same period. Quoted in Mobility Lab:
“Sophisticated personal electronic devices are changing the way Americans use public transportation,” said Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute. “Heavy users of mobile technology are finding train travel to be particularly amenable to their digitally oriented lives. Many relish the idea of using their devices from origin to destination, giving this historic mode of travel a new competitive edge.”
Just to beat the commenters to the punch, I will of course note that correlation does not imply causation; there are many reasons why transit use might have been increasing over this period. But the authors of the study conclude:
These observations are not intended to suggest that other factors, such as a strengthening economy, are not important contributors to the ridership growth. Nevertheless, the data does suggest that fundamental changes are taking place in consumer perceptions about the desirability of traveling by rail. The growing dependence on personal electronic devices appears to have altered the perceived “disutility” of spending time in a seat.
For many reasons, transit and smartphones were made for each other. Using apps like RocketMan, I can avoid waiting in the cold or heat for a streetcar because it tells me when it's coming. I can use the time on the streetcar and bus to catch up on my email backlog. I also scan for articles to read and Instapaper them like mad so that I can read them on the subway, which does not have cell or WiFi yet. And l'm not alone; like Chicago, transit use where I live is higher than it has ever been. The buses, streetcars and trains are full of people like me who would rather look at their phones than drive.
To deal with these changes, the study recommends that transit systems become more airport-like, with charging stations, more comfortable waiting rooms and faster WiFi. And perhaps it's also time for more investment in transit infrastructure instead of highways.