Why teens don't drive anymore

It's a topic I've run into a time or two, but Eric Reguly has forced me to revisit the issue.

In the current issue of the Globe's Report on Business he analyses the matter in a story called "The road not taken" ( "Is the car dead?" in the on-line version.)

Young people in the developed world are demotorizing he tells us. Cars are no longer as cool, convenient, or affordable as they used to be.

Reguly nails it right there with "affordable" but then spins a thousand words of Globe-worthy hooey about  Jane Jacobs and "reinventing cities to appeal to a new generation that no longer associates cars with freedom and convenience".

I'm 100% with Reguly when it comes to preferring public transit. Problem is, where I live there isn't any. And since he lives in Rome now he probably doesn't remember how "convenient" getting round Toronto on public transit is. It's marginally bearable as long as you live close to a major public transit corridor and don't plan on going too far.

So cars are far more convenient for many of us, teens included.

Are they cool? For most teens their dad's Explorer probably wouldn't be that cool, but still a hell of a lot more convenient than public transit. A tricked out (or is it "pimped") Honda Civic does seem to have a certain status among the youth.

If cars were as affordable today as they were a generation or two ago, just as many teens would be driving. What's changed is not the cars or the teens; it's the relative standard of living for working folks.

Twenty years ago a high-school kid with a part-time job could afford a car. Nothing new and nothing fancy, but some sort of what used to be called a jalopy. It was transportation and freedom and a status symbol all in one.

There is one and only one reason kids are not interested in cars; they can't afford them.

Yes, they can still afford the iPhone or the Nikes, and those are the status symbols du jour.

Reguly's attempt to frame the declining standard of living of working people as a matter of personal choice evades the real issue.

Shrinking wages for working people.