Do you want to know, dear reader, what my greatest shame is? No, it has nothing to do with drugs, cigarettes or my internet search history. It’s that I cannot drive.
I would like to believe it is not entirely my fault. I dutifully began lessons at 17, only for Covid to arrive and ruin everything. However, that excuse becomes less convincing with every passing year, particularly when many of my friends, who also turned 17 during the pandemic, have been driving me around for ages.
For most of my life, not being able to drive barely mattered. I grew up in a well connected city and then moved to London at 18. In fact, few things sound more hellish to me than voluntarily getting behind the wheel in central London.
It’s only since meeting my partner, who lives and works in – shudder – the provinces, that I’ve realised quite how useless I am. If he broke his leg while we were out walking in the countryside, I couldn’t drive him to hospital. My only practical skill is knowing all the Tube stops, which is of limited use in a field.
But the thing is, I’m far from alone. Fewer young people are learning to drive than previous generations. The proportion of under-20s with a licence has fallen by 20% since the 1990s, with declines among people in their twenties too.
So what’s happened in the last few decades that means driving has gone from being an essential rite of passage to a sort of optional skill, a plus on your CV?
To return to my ready-made excuse, the pandemic did, in fairness, cancel thousands of lessons across the country and created delays in booking tests that we’re still feeling the consequences of today – in London and the South East, waiting times regularly exceed the maximum allowed booking window of 24 weeks.
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Learning to drive has also become eye-wateringly expensive, so for a generation already struggling with rent, student debt and stagnant wages, shelling out yet more for driving lessons is probably not top of their agendas.
This point also speaks to something wider: for previous generations, passing your test sat alongside leaving home, getting your first job, and settling down as a marker of adulthood. But today’s young adults are staying in education longer, living with parents for longer and buying homes later, if at all. It’s perhaps unsurprising then that driving has joined the list of traditional milestones that are being postponed.
And have we considered that not every young person sees driving as something to aspire to? Younger generations are more concerned about climate change than their parents, and I know from personal experience that we’re also quite nutty about public transport – there was even a TFL appreciation society at my university.
Or perhaps the simplest explanation is that many young people just don’t need to drive. The data shows a massive urban migration among young Brits, highlighted by the fact that nearly one in five members of Gen Z give London as their ultimate dream location, with Manchester following shortly behind. Huge numbers of university graduates also live in the capital.
As much as we do love to whine when there’s a tube strike or when you wait 10 minutes for a bus and then three show up at once, Londoners have it very good when it comes to public transport, and so most young people who live there don’t find themselves in a car unless they’re legless in the back of an Uber after a big night out.
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That may make us the perfect testing ground for the next phase of transport. Waymo, the driverless car company, is set to launch operations in London by September 2026 and, if things go well, autonomous vehicles could become a normal part of city life sooner than we think. For a generation already less likely to learn to drive, the prospect of simply summoning a robot car to do it for us may prove irresistible.
But just as we shouldn’t let AI models do all our thinking for us, we shouldn’t let robots do all our driving. It increases our reliance on automation and makes us ever more susceptible to societal collapse if – or, perhaps, when – somebody figures out how to switch it all off. Or Trump does it accidentally. I wouldn’t entirely rule that out.
So, with that in mind, I should probably put my money where my mouth is and start learning again. And if anyone has a car they’re not too sentimentally attached to (by which I mean a car they are fully prepared never to see again) please do get in touch.
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