Many 16-17 year old slackers too lazy to even get a driver license!
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Date: January 25, 2010 10:31AM
More teens are waiting to get driver licenses
The Washington Post
Updated: 01/25/2010 06:57:13 AM MST
Washington ยป The quest to get a driver license at 16 -- long an American rite of passage -- is on the wane among the digital generation, which no longer sees the family car as the end-all of social life.
The holdouts include Kat Velkoff, who turned 17 in Chantilly, Va., without a license. Focused on tough classes, the debate team, dance and color guard, she turned 18 without taking the wheel. Then 19.
"It just wasn't a priority," said Velkoff, who got her license last year at 20. "It was just never the next thing that needed to get done in my life."
Federal data released Friday underscore a striking national shift: 30.7 percent of 16-year-olds got their licenses in 2008, compared with 44.7 percent in 1988.
"Driving is real important to a lot of the kids in the culture, but it is not the central focus like it was 25 years ago," said Tom Pecoraro, owner of I Drive Smart, a Washington area drivers' education program, who added that plenty of his students are older teens. "They have so many other things to do now," he said, and, with years of being shuttled to sports, lessons and play dates, "kids are used to being driven."
A generation consumed by Facebook and text-messaging, Xbox Live and smartphones no longer needs to climb into a car to connect with friends. And although many teens are still eager to drive, new laws make getting a license far more time-consuming, requiring as many as
60 supervised driving practice hours with an adult.
Rob Foss, director of the Center for the Study of Young Drivers at the University of North Carolina, and others suggest that these "graduated" state licensing systems -- which have created new requirements for learner's permits, supervised practice hours, night driving and passengers in the car -- are responsible for much of the decline in the number of licensed 16-year-olds. At the same time, drivers' education has been cut back in some public schools, so families must scrounge up money -- often $300 to $600 -- for private driving schools.
Then there is car insurance and gas, expenses that make driving too costly for some families and a stretch for others.
"In this economy, if my daughter were to drive, just the insurance would be $1,200 a year or more, and that's a lot of money," said Elizabeth Walker, the mother of a reluctant driver in Rockville, Md. Plenty of parents don't want their children driving at 16, given the congestion and peril of the roads and the fact that car crashes are the leading cause of teen deaths.