The good news is that there are fewer teenage drivers on the road these days. The bad news is that the culture that has given us fewer teenage drivers is a disordered culture of screen addiction, safety obsession, and helicopter parenting.

Parents everywhere wonder why their high schoolers or college freshmen have no interest in getting driver's licenses. The Washington Post carried the latest trend piece on this phenomenon: “Why aren’t teenagers driving anymore?” And the information does corroborate the headline’s premise.

In 1983, 80.4% of American 18-year-olds had a driver’s license, according to U.S. government data. By 2008, when millennials were becoming adults, the percentage had plummeted to 65.4%. In 2018, it was 60.9%, and it has likely dropped further in the past five years.

Just a generation ago, it seemed like a rite of passage to get your learner’s permit on your 16th birthday or earlier and to schedule your road test as early as possible.

A license meant freedom — and that might just be the problem.

Millennials started this trend toward late driving, just as they started the broader trend toward late adulthood. They are later to marry, later to have children, later to buy homes.

The mystified parents are to blame here. “So many parents I know are obsessed with keeping their kids safe at all costs,” one parent told the Washington Post. But if you never let your children run wild as 10-year-olds or ride their bikes freely as 12-year-olds, and you forced them into masks as 14-year-olds, you can’t expect them to develop a sudden appetite for freedom as 16-year-olds.

“There is the question of independence, at least that’s what I’m told all the time,” Generation Z high-schooler Celeste Robinson told USA Today in another trend piece. “But I’m an anxious person, and driving does seem intimidating to me. I’ve tried it, and it just feels very hard."

So what do the children do instead? Some get shuttled by their helicopter parents. Some rely on Uber and Lyft. Others just don’t go out that much.

“He spends a lot of time playing video games,” one mother said to the Washington Post of her nondriving son. “That’s where his community is. So he doesn’t really need to go anywhere to hang out with people.”

Screens, and the young’uns’ addiction to them, are a reason teenage driving has dropped since 2008. Driving is a drag, some teenagers report, because you can’t (safely) look at your phone while you do it. Public transit, walking, and letting your mother or your friends drive gives you more time to watch TikToks and scroll through whatever apps young people use these days.

Conservative intellectual Yuval Levin described the broader cultural problem as a “disordered passivity.” That’s bad news as we face a baby bust and a crisis of responsibility. At least you can enjoy safer, emptier roads as a consolation.