Do teens no longer care about driving? Has the once cross-generational symbol of teenage liberation taken a backseat to various other priorities for many 16-year-olds across the country? According to the Washington Post, the answer is yes.

In a Jan. 24 story, the Washington Post suggested that there has been a large drop in teenagers getting their driver’s licenses and stated that this is mostly because students simply don’t care about driving as much as they once did.

They based this assertion on recently released data compiled by the Federal Highway Administration, which showed that about 30 percent of 16-year-olds held driver’s licenses in 2008 compared 44.7 percent in 1988.

While the data seems to clearly suggest an undeniable drop in the number of teens pursuing their licenses, Rob Foss, the director of the Center for Young Drivers at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center, says otherwise.

Foss says that the trend, as documented by the Washington Post, is inaccurate because “intermediate licenses,” like the provisional driver’s license in Maryland, have only existed since 1996.  The federal data, however, only considers full licenses in their statistics, which Foss says means as many as 50,000 teens with provisional licenses in his native North Carolina are unaccounted for.

“The drop is merely in what is counted as licensed,” Foss says. “The size of this effect is different in different states, so the Federal data are pretty much impossible to interpret, and most researchers who study young drivers now know not to trust those data.”

However, while the Washington Post emphasized lack of interest over lack of time, the latter seems to be the driving force among the few unlicensed teens.

Beginning last year, teens must be 16 and nine months to get their licenses, an increase from 16 and six months. Before 2005, teens only had to be 16 and four months to get their licenses.

Also in 2005, the number of practice hours required increased from 40 to 60, including 10 hours at night.

Senior Thatcher Ladd, one of the few seniors to have put off getting his license until now, didn’t do so because of a lack of interest, but because of a lack of time.

“Junior year was pretty tough,” Ladd says.  “I thought I could lessen my workload, and driver’s ed was the first thing to cut out of my schedule.”

For a school full of hard-working, extracurricular-laden students, blowing off the driving process isn’t unreasonable—but it’s definitely not without its disadvantages.

With no older siblings at home to drive him around, Ladd has been deprived of the independence of driving that many high school students consider essential. Even though he originally aimed to start the driving process with others in his grade, he fell behind quickly and now has to call his friends for rides all the time.

“Did it seem right at the time? Sure,” Ladd says. “Do I regret it now? Absolutely.”

To see the Washington Post story, click here.