So, yes we do know that the popularity of driver’s licenses has been declining in the next generation for quite some years now. Do we have newer articles about the subject? Yes, we do, by a few years. Alas, that being said that this is a human generational decline, of course being only a few years newer doesn’t really tell you that much in terms of new information.
20190114/DuckDuckGo declining 16 year old driver’s license
20190114/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-decline-of-the-drivers-license/425169/
20190114/http://time.com/money/4185441/millennials-drivers-licenses-gen-x/
20190114/http://fortune.com/2016/01/20/decline-drivers-licenses-for-millennials/
The few different articles I’ve found appear to repeat a lot of the same information, as if they were grabbing their details from the same sources. Yes, this is the source they were quoting:
20190118/https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/99124/102951.pdf?sequence=1
Anyways, these are some of the interesting details I wanted to summarize.
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The percentage of people aged between 16 and 44 with a driver’s license has been decreasing steadily since 1983.
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16-year-olds licensed: 1983 had 46.2%, 2014 had 24.5%, down 47%
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19-year-olds licensed: 1983 87.3%, 2014 had 69%, down 21%
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Young adults licensed decreased between 1983 and 2014 as follows: down 16.4% 20-to-24-year-olds, down 11% 25-to-29-year-olds, down 10.3% 30-to-34-year-olds, down 7.4% 35-to-39-year-olds
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“For people between 40 and 54, the declines were small, less than 5 percent.”
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“Above 55, the story’s a little different. Older adults were more likely to have a driver’s license in 2014 than in 1983—in the case of those 70 and older, 43.6 percent more likely. But these age groups, too, saw a modest decline from 2011 to 2014.”
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Top reasons why people don’t have a driver’s license:
“too busy or not enough time to get a driver’s license” (37 percent), “owning and maintaining a vehicle is too expensive”(32 percent), and “able to get transportation from others” (31 percent).
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Further down the list of reasons for not getting a license in the 2013 survey were a preference for biking or walking (22%), public transportation (17%), concern for the environment 9%), the ability to do business online (8%), and disability (7%).
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69% of respondents said they plan to get a license in the next five years.
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Again, I reiterate, because this is important! We have already passed peak car.
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If you are upset by a bad driver, chances are that bad driver is an older fellow, not a teen.
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Shaming a teen for not having a driver’s license is unlikely to be a viable insult anymore.
Now, this is a really old article from 2005, stating that the switch to the graduated driver’s license system has decreased the number of teen driver fatalities per capita.
20190114/https://www.iihs.org/iihs/news/desktopnews/fewer-16-year-olds-are-getting-involved-in-crashes-big-decline-in-crash-rates-of-beginning-drivers-over-a-decade