Driving Licences: a Tale of Two Generations

We often here about how “Gen Z” are worried about student debt, rising prices, and climate change, and prefer to use Uber and bicycle rather than be saddled with the cost of owning a car. But it’s all to easy to get taken in by attention–grabbing headlines such as “the young are falling out of love with cars” (The Economist Feb 16th 2023), but what does the data say?

Driving licence holding data is one source of hard facts and this certainly shows some interesting trends as the chart below illustrates. However, it’s as well to remember that data needs “reading” and that there is always a risk that it shows what you’re looking to see. While you can try and keep an open mind, unconscious biases can still have an impact, so I prefer to consider data from different angles and then use supporting evidence to help identify the most accurate interpretation. So here are two perspectives on this data.

A positive interpretation is that 17-20 year olds are becoming less attracted to driving because of environmental concerns and fewer are getting a licence as a result. A headline statistic supporting this view is that the percentage of this age group with a full UK driving licence fell by 44% between 2018 and 2021.

An alternative view is that young adults are just delaying getting a licence because of financial pressures. Some evidence for this shown in the increase in licence holding amongst the 21-29 year old age group.

Looking at the bigger picture shows an even less positive picture in that licence holding amongst older age adults is increasing, particularly for women. For example, the proportion of females aged 70+ with a driving licence increased by 23% between 2018 and 2021.

Worse, there’s more growth to come as the proportion of women aged 70+ with a licence is still some way behind that of their male counterparts: in 2021 66% of females aged 70+ had a licence compared with 85% of males and we can expect this gap to continue to narrow.

In fact, given the increasing availability of driver aids such as lane assist and parking assist, it is possible that the proportion of both men and women of older age groups who drive will increase, even if we don’t get to a point where driverless cars are common.

So while a lot of the attention is on Gen Z and Millennials, we shouldn’t forget the Baby Boomer and Silent generations, especially as we have an ageing population. We also need to be aware that figures for 2020 and 2021 are heavily impacted by COVID-19 in ways we are still uncertain about so we really need to see data for 2022 and 2023 before projecting trends from earlier data.

Looking beyond the numbers though, two important things seem apparent:

·??????Young adults, especially those living in urban areas, are in less of a rush to get a car than they used to be and this should provide an opportunity to delay this as long as possible, if not avoid it entirely. For this age group, technology can be used to help a life without owning a car with.

·??????Older adults seem keen to extend the feeling of freedom that car gives them and this is being facilitated by assistive technology. Since there are more older age adults than young adults (in the UK there are 6.3m 17-20 year olds but 11.8m aged 70+) and this imbalance is increasing, more attention needs to be given to this cohort which might be labelled “the invisibles”.??

More generally, this illustrates the value of looking beneath the headlines to the underlying data which will almost certainly reveal a more complex picture.?

#driving #environment #drivinglicense #drivinglicence #genz #millennials #babyboomers