Poorer young people, tougher licensing laws, shifting teen attitudes, protective boomer parents, soaring auto insurance premiums — these and other factors appear to have conspired to keep not just the majority of 16-year-olds, but more teens of all ages from driving.

Only 43 percent of all 16- and 17-year-old Americans were licensed in 2002, the last year for which statistics were available, according to the Federal Highway Administration and U.S. Census Bureau. In 1992, that figure was nearly 52 percent.

Yet for all its size, the phenomenon has largely eluded the cultural radar, even as it has left parents privately commiserating about kids who need to be chauffeured long after they've graduated from high school.

Politicians still call for crackdowns on the supposed legions of reckless teen drivers filling the highways. TV shows such as "The O.C." routinely depict teens driving. Pop and hip-hop songs about cars still get the level of air play the Beach Boys did back when teens lived in fear that Daddy might actually take the T-bird away.

This is in part because cars are still a big deal. Even with lowered proportions of young drivers, millions of adolescents remain on the freeways, and traffic crashes still are the leading cause of death for 15- to 20-year-olds.

But it also may be because, as trends go, the decline in licensing has been slow and has reached critical mass only in the past decade.

Licensing difficulties

In any case, it is making itself felt in places like suburban Orange County, Calif., where Ma-nako Ihaya, a mother of four, recently bought a sporty red Honda in an attempt to entice her 18- and 20-year-old daughters to get licensed. So far, she said, they've ignored the bribe.

Like most of her classmates at Laguna Hills High School, Kayte Greenfelder took driver education at 16. She sat through the grainy old death-on-the-asphalt movies, memorized the handouts on right-of-way and traffic signals, even went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and got a learner's permit.

Somehow, though, she never got around to actually getting her license. "I guess I was lazy — plus, I couldn't afford the insurance, and standing in line at the DMV just felt like a big hassle," said Greenfelder, who at 19 still isn't driving.

In Riverside, 16-year-old Kevin Wintersteen says he'd like a license, but he keeps hitting roadblocks.

"First, we didn't have the money for driving classes. Then we got the money, but on the day they had the classes, I had football practice and I didn't want to miss," he said. "Then I found this online class. And we

sent $85 and they sent all this stuff. But then our Internet got messed up and it took three or four weeks for it to come back. Then the test you had to take to pass the class was pretty long, and each chapter was, like, 20 or 30 questions, and I was just doing a chapter, like, every now and then. And then when I finished it, we couldn't find an envelope."

Doing without, however, hasn't been as painful as he'd expected, Wintersteen said. His mom drops him off every morning at his school's entrance, and his girlfriend, who is 18, provides the transportation when he goes out.

In urban Los Angeles, Garfield High School football coach Lorenzo Hernandez recently bought an SUV to shuttle players because so many lacked transportation. "It's amazing," said Hernandez. "It used to be if kids needed rides, there were seniors or whoever who could take them. But we have 56 kids on the team this year and I only have, like, two who can drive."

End of driver ed

The road to a driver's license wasn't always daunting. As recently as a generation ago, even the strictest states required little more than 30 hours of driver education in a public school classroom — taught as often as not by one of the coaches — half a dozen hours behind the wheel under adult supervision and a passing score on a driving test.

But driver education became a target during the 1980s after a series of studies indicated that teenagers who took the then-mandatory courses had roughly the same accident rates as those who didn't. Federal subsidies dried up and, one by one, states phased the programs out.

Now, according to a USA Today survey conducted last year, only about half the states provide any funding for driver ed in high school, and in nearly all of those states, school district participation is voluntary.

In its place, states in the 1990s began adopting "graduated" licensing, which sharply increased the commitment of time and money involved in getting a license while restricting driving privileges for those younger than 18.

In California, for instance, a 16-year-old must spend six months with a learner's permit and receive both driver ed and 50 hours of supervised driving practice before applying for a license.

In Hawai'i, a law requires all drivers younger than 18 to complete a mandatory driver-education program before taking a road test for a license. However, there is a long waiting list for the training sessions in most public schools, forcing teenagers to either take private lessons or wait until they turn 18 to drive.

With public driver education all but extinct, most students find themselves forced to pay for private instruction, an investment that can cost hundreds of dollars per student at a driving school. Then, even if the 16-year-old passes the driving test, a provisional license may restrict him or her from carrying other teenagers without adult supervision or from being on the road after midnight. Not much of a payoff for such a hefty investment, many teenagers say.

But those changes don't explain the fact that licensure rates are declining for all young drivers, not just the graduated-licensing crowd younger than 18.

"I don't think anybody really knows for certain why it's happening," said Allan Williams, chief scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va. However, sociologists who have begun to study the phenomenon have some strong suspicions, starting with the many ways that life has changed for this generation of American teens.

University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males, who has written extensively on social trends involving young people, thinks it's about money. "Cars are expensive, and expensive to insure," he said.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners reports, for example, that the average expenditure for auto insurance rose from $637 per vehicle in 1993 to $774 in 2002, the last year for which data are available. Because crash risk rises with inexperience, adding a teenaged driver further ups the ante, typically doubling or even tripling a family's premiums.