Who needs the keys?
On car culture, failure to launch, and the potentially mixed bag of outcomes if younger drivers continue to simply drop out
The contributory and causal reasons may be many, but the result is stark: Three-quarters of American 16-year-olds don’t drive. Many learn between 16 and 18, but the share of non-driver 18-year-olds is 40%. To generations who treated learning to drive as one of the main rites of passage -- if not the main event itself! -- the figures can be astonishing.
■ There’s perhaps something of a silver lining to the data, in that cars are less of a cultural obsession to the generation newly rising into adulthood than they were to older generations. That may open the door to smarter urban designs, more imaginative transportation frameworks, better land use, and less carbon-intensive means of getting people around. Fleets of autonomous electric vehicles may become normalized without massive cultural resistance.
■ But the United States remains an enormous country, populated at a fraction of the density of most countries in Europe, and some Great American Road Trips will remain not only desirable, but fundamentally necessary for the good of the economy. We can do a lot via Zoom meetings and Teams calls, but there are lots of tasks remaining where someone still has to go and see it for themselves. Lawyers, plumbers, engineers, portrait photographers, and security consultants will all need to visit their clients (or their clients’ properties) from time to time, and there may not always be an Uber at the ready or a Waymo capable of navigating the back roads.
■ It’s best if we avoid too much rigidity in response to a major trend shift like the decline in adolescent driving, but it should certainly lead us to reappraise our assumptions about the status quo and give fresh thought to the direction of things to come.