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54 The Economist February 18th 2023 International The future of the car Driven away F or Adah Crandall, a high­school stu- dent in Portland, Oregon, a daily annoy- ance is family members asking when she is going to learn to drive. Ms Crandall, who is 16, has spent a quarter of her life arguing against the car­centric planning of her city. At 12 she attended a school next to a major road down which thousands of lorries thundered every day. When a teacher invit- ed a speaker to talk about air pollution, she and her classmates were galvanised. With- in a year, she was travelling to Salem, Ore- gon’s capital, to demand lawmakers pass stricter laws on diesel engines. Yet her family still nags her to get her driver’s licence. “[It’s] seen as this ticket to independence. It’s so glorified,” she says. Ms Crandall admits her life would be easier if she had access to a car—she would spend less time on buses, and could drive to the coast with her friends. But she hates the idea that she should have to. “Why in our society is our identity so tied to car use?” she asks. “If I choose to comply and get my driver’s licence it would be like giving in.” Few technologies defined the 20th cen- tury more than the car. On the surface, the love affair with the personal automobile continues unabated into this century. The number of drivers on the world’s roads continues to rise almost everywhere. The distance driven by American motorists hit a new peak last year, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. But there are hints that this is changing. People like Ms Crandall show why. Getting a driv- ing licence was once a nearly universal rite of passage into adulthood. Now it is some- thing that a growing minority of young people either ignore or actively oppose, into their 20s and beyond. That, in turn, is starting to create more support for a anti­car policies being passed in cities around the world. From New York to Norway, a growing number of cities and local politicians are passing anti­car laws, ripping out parking spaces, blocking off roads and changing planning rules to fa- vour pedestrians over drivers. Anne Hidal- go, the socialist mayor of Paris, boasts of “reconquering” her city for its residents. Campaigners detect a sea change. Even a few years ago “there was a sense that we were the weirdos,” says Doug Gordon, a founder of “The War on Cars”, a podcast based in New York. Now, he says, “more and more elected officials are adopting po- sitions that were [until recently] on the fringe.” After a century in which the car re- made the rich world, making possible everything from suburbs and supermar- kets to drive­through restaurants and rush­hour traffic jams, the momentum may be beginning to swing the other way. Start with the demography, and in the country most shaped by the car. The aver- age American driver goes much farther every year than most of his or her rich- world contemporaries: around 14,300 miles (23,000km) in 2022, which is about twice as far as the typical Frenchman. Nearly a century of road­building has re- sulted in sprawling cities, in which it is hard to get around in any other way. The ci- ty of Jacksonville, Florida, for instance, spreads across 875 square miles. With around 1m residents, that makes it only about twice as densely populated as the whole of England, only around 8% of which is classified as “urban”. In the suburbs I learned to drive The Supreme Court said in 1977 that having a car was a “virtual necessity” for anyone living in America. By 1997, 43% of the coun- try’s 16­year­olds had driving licences. But in 2020, the most recent year for which fig- ures are available, the number had fallen to just 25%. Nor is it just teenagers. One in five Americans aged between 20 and 24 does not have a licence, up from just one in CHICAGO Around the world, the young seem to be falling out of love with cars 012