Seeing the back of the Automobile Age

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Can this really be true? That young people in the global north are falling out of love with the automobile?

The Economist (paywall) has said it discerns a change, most significantly in America, “the country most shaped by the car”. In 1997, 43 per cent of 16-year-olds in the United States had driving licences, but in 2020, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number had fallen to just 25 per cent. More to the point, says the newspaper, “One in five Americans aged between 20 and 24 does not have a licence, up from just one in 12 in 1983. The proportion of people with licences has fallen for every age group under 40, and on the latest data, is still falling. And even those who do have them are driving less. Between 1990 and 2017 the distance driven by teenage drivers in America declined by 35 per cent and those aged 20–34 by 18 per cent.”

The same sort of trend is visible, the piece says, in Britain, in most European Union (EU) member s…