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>–It’s harder to get a license. From 1996 to 2006, every state enacted graduated driving laws that make it more cumbersome for young people to get licenses. “Young people must now take more behind-the-wheel training (which is more expensive), fulfill additional requirements for permits, and once they are allowed to drive, they are often restricted to driving in the daytime without passengers.” The number of younger Americans without a driver’s license has risen from 21 percent to 26 percent since 2001.

This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates.

I always thought that the roads would be much safer if our legal drinking age and legal driving ages were switched, so that we'd have years of experience dealing with the effects of alcohol before we hit the roads, which would hopefully decrease incidents of driving under the influence of alcohol.

In response to dead sibling comment by parasitius:

I agree with your sentiment but not your tone. There is a lot of anti-suburban, anti-car elitism on HN that is apparently ignorant of the very real need for personal transportation for the vast majority of people, even in many major cities. I would support increased driver training requirements (especially specific training and experience with loss of control on various surfaces), but not without a way of ensuring that the transportation and employment needs of everyone, including youth, are still met.

Also, you're probably aware, but your account has been dead for a long time, apparently due to excessively harsh and/or personal negative comments.

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In response to the general subject of driving, it is my opinion that arbitrary point-to-point human mobility is an essential feature of an ideal society. The inability to move from place to place for employment, vacation, or recreation is, again in my opinion, detrimental to society's mutual respect and wellbeing, and leads to economic and cultural segregation.
>This is a great development

As someone who was socioeconomically prevented from getting a license until his mid-20s, no, it's not. A license in many cases is a ticket out of poverty and a chance to break the cycle of poverty. This is especially true in rural or far-flung suburban areas.

That said, the poor behavior of young drivers is a legitimate concern. I'm all for addressing it. Just not a fan of economically disenfranchising people.

"This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates."

Is it? Is it working? I just spent five minutes on Google trying to answer that question, but if it's out there it's buried under megabytes of high-Google-juice warnings about teenaged driving.

It's only a positive development if it's working. If it isn't working, then it's just an expensive imposition sucking away time and funds that could have been spent on something more productive. But I honestly don't know which is the case. Anyone have a better bead on analysis than I do? I think it's an interesting question. Many of these programs have been going on for long enough that there ought to be an answer out there somewhere.

> This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates

A lot of people think that if obtaining a license is harder, the roads will be safer, but it's more an urban wisdom than science. If you take various numbers from around the world, you will notice there is no linear correlation between those two, especially when harder is pay more than you should and sit in class harder, instead of learn how to run a special stage on snow and ice harder. Also, in places where driving is a privilege, drivers tend to feel privileged. The sad truth is just that almost everywhere driving training simply sucks, with the well-known exception of Finland.

"This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates."

Wow, restricting people's freedom, a great development? Seriously ? Why not restrict access to computers considering the recklessness of "hackers" ? And so on.

You are going to build a bleak future if people do not drive as much.

> I always thought that the roads would be much safer if our legal drinking age and legal driving ages were switched

They are switched in many Western European countries, and imho that works fine. Also because there generally is more public transportation and/or neighbourhood pubs/clubs.

(though some countries have raised the drinking age, making them come about at the same time, which is even worse)

A 16 drinking age, 18 driving age does create quite a different youth culture though. Less fuss about alcohol (though it differing more with parents permissiveness), more about cars, and early networks and contacts being more local.

> I always thought that the roads would be much safer if our legal drinking age and legal driving ages were switched, so that we'd have years of experience dealing with the effects of alcohol before we hit the roads, which would hopefully decrease incidents of driving under the influence of alcohol.

Not to mention it's easier to illegally gain access to alcohol than it is to illegally get access to a car, so the probability that the higher driving age law would be flouted would be lower than the rate at which the drinking age law is flouted right now.

>Young people must now take more behind-the-wheel training (which is more expensive) >fulfil additional requirements for permits

This is not true at all. I do not know where he is getting his information. And there are literally no requirements for the permit. All you do is take a vision test and a knowledge multiple choice on the computer which anyone can pass if they know the simple basics.

>and once they are allowed to drive, they are often restricted to driving in the daytime without passengers.

This only applies to people with a provisional license (if you are under 18), and you can have passengers as long as they are in your family (brothers or sisters), and this only lasts for the first 6 months.

> This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates.

This would be a great development indeed, if alternate forms of transportation like buses, light-rail and train services were vastly improved.

While I champion the idea of bike commuting (ie live close to where you work), carpooling and vanpooling (have done all three for years sequentially), the goal of getting more dangerous drivers (ie, inexperienced teens) off the road shouldn't disenfranchise them. Non-drivers need transport as well, and most US cities are abhorrent for this compared to other developed countries (HK, France, UK, Brazil, Russia all have amazing transport systems).

A better solution to that is graduated licensing where all new drivers start with restrictions on what times they can drive, at what speed, whether they can drive on highways, with friends of the same age in the car, etc.
From ages 16 through 36, I lived in Cambridge, MA and then Manhattan, and didn't own a car. (I of course rented cars on business trips, and borrowed my parents' when I visited them.)

What I missed most in not having wheels was convenience in shopping and so on. Groceries aside, that's now largely obviated by e-commerce. And grocery shopping alone is hardly a reason to have a car ...

Now easier rentals -- Zipcar! -- raise a whole other reason not to own one's own car.

Further, there was an era when cars provided teenagers with private space, a bit of a chance for sexual exploration, and so on. When both their parents have jobs, however, that's less needed. That's reason #1 much of the "romance" of cars is gone.

Reason #2 is that electronic items have supplanted cars as major aspirations. Phones, computers, etc. are gateways to the world the way automobiles used to be.

Reason #3 (small but still worth mentioning) that cars lost their romance is their boring, aerodynamically-wise designs. Reason #4, related, is the environmentalist pushback against cars.

There is something that solutions like public transportation, taxis, or Zipcar-like car-sharing lack - hygiene. Because those aren't personal, more often than not, the hygiene is not in your control.
I always think of driving a car as managing a steam engine machine during the industrial revolution. There're levers, and pedals and cogwheels, and everything needs to be pulled and turned in certain directions. Short, I hate it and it is bad for the environment. Also, cars are expensive, need a lot of care, consume space, and going anywhere always ends up searching frantically for parking space. I rather outsource the whole transportation business to public transport and then I can also code or read while I'm moving and not have to administer this weird steam-engine-like machinery.
Personally, I rather enjoy driving my car; and I would enjoy driving a Tesla, too, and they're not [as] bad [supposedly] for the environment. Or at least their badness is a one-off rather than a continual thing. To each their own, I suppose.

That said, I frequently train myself to drive just a little bit better in just a little bit harsher conditions. Learn where my car's tires limits for sliding are, and learn how they gradually change over time as the tires wear down. Learn how much I can accelerate at a given moment at a given speed, so that I can use that for avoiding an obstacle. Learn how efficiently I can brake and turn under braking, so I know how well I can avoid other kinds of obstacles.

It's an experience, to me, to drive a car, and control it and tell it where to go; and the only way I've ever gotten better at it was to actually drive and drive quite a lot, in many unique situations. Rain, snow, heavy traffic, low traffic, light, dark, fog, low visibility, high visibility, and so on.

But meh, to each their own.

Back on topic. I think we need proper drivers education that has a physical foot-to-pedal, hand-to-wheel sort of education for our drivers :/

Unfortunately, where I live, (smallish city in southwestern Arizona) a car is a requirement. Grocery store? Nine miles. Hardware store? Four more miles.

Oh, and it's 120 degrees outside in the summer.

That being said, parking is abundant, gas is relatively cheap, and traffic is very nice. So it's not too bad. I would never want to have a car in the city, though.

Well, just because you don't like it, why should everybody else not use it? If you don't like driving, then don't. And I don't mind more efficient public transport. But what is "steam engine machinery" for you is fascinating and a pure pleasure to use for somebody else. And to be honest, modern cars are easier to use than some kitchen appliances - don't need to insert a key anymore, press a button on the dashboard, you get two pedals, one to go faster,the other to go slower, and then turn the round spiny-thing to go in the direction you want to. Seriously, bicycles are more complicated to use than than.
Because it's a miserable experience, and a waste of time, and living in an actual city is a good way to rebel against your parents' pathological love of exurbs.
Yeah, you couldn't pay me enough to live in a city. Comes down to the fact that people suck, and in a city you can't get away from them. I'll take my 2 acre yard any day.
Yes, a miserable experience, often a waste of time (though I see a lot of traffic on HN about computer games...). I don't think that we boomers had a pathological love of the exurbs as such. But in many cases we moved there for perceived safety and for better public schools. In some cases I suppose because custody of the car keys gave us some more years of control.
I'm 19 and attending university. The local bus system has a bus that goes from literally in front of my apartment to the heart of campus, and it's free for students. I buy things from Amazon or a supermarket that's only about a mile away. Almost all of my entertainment is digital in some fashion (usually downloaded TV shows or movies). And I don't live in a huge city -- its population is about 100k. I have a car that I use maybe once a week at best. I just don't see the point in driving all that much.
> Technology is making it easier to go car-free

This makes me wonder what the future of driving and personal transportation will look like.

Regarding the sharing economy, pg recently Tweeted "Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly?"

I'm originally from New Jersey and I'm currently living in Seoul, Korea. Back home in NJ, you literally couldn't get anywhere without a car. Besides getting to NYC, public transportation (buses) was basically useless or nonexistant. Now I live in Seoul which is super densely populated and has arguably the best, most advanced public transportation infrastructure in the world. I've never driven a car in Seoul simply because I've never had to - Subways and buses are faster, cheaper, cognitively easier to use, and I never have to worry about finding a parking spot.

There have been a lot of new startups entering or looking to enter this space - Ridesharing services, parking spot finder apps, Google driverless car, etc. - But which will become the dominant form of transportation in the next 5~10 years and why? I'm fascinated to see what people "in the know" and involved in this space think.

A few anecdotes:

1) A few weeks ago, a 15 year old girl in my neighborhood, learning to drive on a slow side road with her parent in the car, mistook the gas for the break while practicing backing up and ran over three young children putting them in critical condition.

2) A relative of mine was given a new big "safe" vehicle for her 16th birthday. The photos from the event were full of incredible excited smiles.

Three months later, while leaving her part-time "earn your own gas money" job, she met a "cute guy" friend of hers from school who wanted to bum a ride. Foolishly she agreed, on the way to her vehicle, two of her "cute guy"'s friends suddenly showed up asking if they too could bum a ride.

Peer pressure and hormones fully kicked in, they all loaded into the vehicle and started on their way.

On a clear evening, doing about 40 on a paved road with no other traffic, she veered off the road surface, over-corrected getting back on, cut sideways across the road into a field and hit a tree straight on.

She was killed instantly, one of the boys is paralyzed from the neck down and the other two spent a bit of time in critical condition in the hospital.

3) After that happened I thought back to when I was a 16 year old, with a used beater car and what kind of stupid stupid driving I did back then. It was a miracle I survived almost any time I got behind the wheel.

This was even considering that, growing up in a rural area, my parents taught me to drive on the back roads when I was about 11 (in case of an emergency). They had me practice regular driving up until I got my actual license. Even after almost 5 years of sporadic driving lessons, including a minor fender bender in my parent's driveway. Despite passing the driving exam on my first shot with no practice and no studying, I still drove like a damn fool. (and in my state at the time we had to have something like 20 hours of professionally supervised behind the wheel instruction and 20 hours of classroom before being allowed to take the test).

It wasn't until I hit about 20 that I started to drive like a person concerned at all with preserving my lifespan.

Younger American's shouldn't drive. We should get a learners at 18, be required to have a fully licensed person over 25 (or better yet a parental unit) in the car with us until 19, then no passengers at all till we get a real license at 21. It's not just familiarity with alcohol or any of that, young people are just simply not yet fully wired to deal with complex social pressures, impulse control or any of the other kinds of "maturity issues" needed to operate a 2 ton block of iron that can be coaxed to 100mph in under 30 seconds.

The cellphone means that young people don't have to "drive to the mall" to see if their friends are hanging out there. They can just call and find out where the party is...or just talk on the phone instead of face to face...or just use Facebook, etc.

Their communications are more efficient.

I did find a report once that made a very strong case that it's not young drivers that are the problem - it's inexperienced drivers. The correlation between youth and inexperience is of course very strong, hence the (alleged) misconception. Sadly I didn't make a note of it and can't find it now.

That said, as a general rule of thumb, teenagers do suffer from various other pressures that might make them bad drivers too (although I certainly have seen people in their thirties goaded into driving badly by other people in the car).

Younger people buy their stuff online. Anytime someone wants to buy something they no longer have to drive to get it. I wouldn't be surprised if this impacts younger cohorts more as well.
TL;DR because they are too broke for gas, and don't have a job to drive to, anyway. And Facebook.
We have the same development in Germany.

Having a car is not that much of a status symbol anymore as it used to be, being ecological is "in" and saves a ton of money if you have good public transport or like biking.

I'm 29 and never owned a car.. I use Carsharing from time to time.. if I need a car I check https://www.car2go.com/de/berlin/ and https://de.drive-now.com/php/metropolis/city_berlin?cit=6099...

Oh, boy. Looking through these comments I can easily see cars being the "gun debate" of 50 years from now.

On the one hand, you have the public safety and efficiency argument of the pro-Google self-driving cars group. On the other hand, you have the freedom-loving, it's my right to operate this dangerous but fun piece of machinery group.

Before this realization, I probably would have been anti-person-driven-car and pro-let-them-have-their-guns, but that seems inconsistent now. Hm.

One major thing missing here: we like to be spontaneous and unpredictable. That means that a car can often be a ball and chain.

Want to go get a drink with friends in the park and who knows where you'll end up? Have fun getting back to your car tomorrow morning.

//It’s harder to get a license. From 1996 to 2006//

As the parent of two teenagers, it is my opinion that at least in VA, it is still way too easy to get a license.

Although neither of mine had that desire to get a license as soon as possible, like we did as kids. My son didn't get his until weeks before his 18th birthday. My 17 year old daughter still just has a permit and doesn't seem to be in any hurry either, which is fine with me.

If you live in a (bigger) city you simply don't need a car...

I can drive to the store by bike or even walk there if I want.

I work in a different city than I live and travel to my workplace by train in 30min.

The only things I need a car for are travels to are tiny town which doesn't have good public transports or when I need to transport something thats to heavy to carry.

All of the reasons mentioned in the article play into this, but they missed a big one: young Americans tend to prefer access over ownership, and there just aren't any good ways to use a car. Zipcar is expensive, especially if you stay at your destination for any period of time.
Two main reasons:

1) Youth income is low given low employment and a stagnant economy which some would call a recession.

2) High gas prices means less cars and more public transit.

Does anyone have a corresponding graph of passenger air-miles flown for the same period? I'm curious about the impact of lower-cost airlines and if "road-trip" vacations have been substituted by airline trips.
One take on the phenomenon: http://statesofmotion.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/wasted-youth.ht... - the author is clearly a car nut, though! Personally i suspect the car has just had its time in the limelight, as a fashionable item at the bleeding edge of culture and engineering, and is destined to turn into a commodity good, like the fridge freezer. Assuming it's not there already. Just takes a new generation for attitudes to change, as with everything...
If I had to guess...

  - spending money spent on smartphones and online goods
  - time spent online, playing computer or console games
  - less necessity to travel to have fun
  - disinterest in dealing with government/insurance regime
  - more interest in recreational drugs (booze and other)
  - the increasing intrusiveness, heavy fines, and penalties imposed by a police state with particular regard to vehicular travel
i wish less older people would drive as well, or at least be re-tested behind the wheel after retirement.
The article neglected to mention that technology use really requires you to go car-free. Many states are enacting hands-free laws and every indication suggests that outright bans on cell phone use will follow. (http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/13/us/ntsb-cell-phone-ban) Car manufacturers have been trying to integrate voice commands and web services in car dashboards, but those features can't compete with the full productivity enabled by access to a mobile device. Public transit operators need to understand that wifi access will be a deciding factor for many commuters looking to go car-free.
Got my driving licence the day I hit 18 (disclosure not living in the US) and always had the means to support a car and drive (bonus of starting working as a developer on age 15). Two years ago it expired and I didn't bother to renew it. The car shines only outside the city - great public transport and cabs give you more than enough flexibility.

I think that factors are coliding - the car is deromanticized, it is expensive and it is a drain on the free time. I feel that rent-a-car is a industry in grave need of disrupting.

There are a lot of owned vehicles that do less than 2K miles per year. A Uber/Air bnb type startup that allows to rent a car from a person for the weekend may have potential.

I'm 20 and I haven't the faintest idea how to drive; don't intend to learn in the near future, though I may be forced to at some later day...
Can anybody tell me if it's the same for young americans as it is for young british drivers? I can't drive at the moment because the lessons cost £40 an hour, the test costs ~£150 with car hire. Insurance can cost up to £4k a year and petrol for my commute would cost me about £70 a week.
1) Climate change is going to kill us all

2) A hot bike is more likely to get you laid than a hot car

CASE CLOSED. Now can we please stop talking about reduced driving like its a problem?

For someone live in a country where traveling to work require an hour or two, the "How" will be much more interesting than the "Why".
With all the gadgets like smartphones etc. to buy who has money to pay for a car?
Most U.S. driving miles are commuting, which sucks.

I took an 8,137-mile road trip when I was 22 and it was a blast. I'd love to do something like that again. It cost me a few hundred bucks in gas, but it was worth it.

However, racking up 20,000 miles in a year just to get from one point to another, while a million people are (being forced into it by social convention) trying to travel the exact same routes at the exact same time, is just horrible. It's a total waste of life. I'd prefer to take public transportation or to bike if at all possible. There is simply no good in a high-traffic, stop-and-go, morning car commute.

Automotive traffic is a perfect example of failure-to-scale. Cars are amazing (I'm ignoring the environmental issues, which I imagine electric cars will solve in ~20 years) when traffic is sparse, but become prisons in the typical commute.

Also, in most cities, it's actually worth it to live in the city if your time is worth more than about $30 per hour, and when you include career-building effects that applies to most educated young people who have jobs, even if their nominal wages are lower.