Number of Drivers Drops, but Who Can Tell?

Even if you take a good look around the next time you’re on the road, you may not notice a surprising development in car-crazy California--there are fewer drivers crowding the streets than there used to be.

For the first time since the state began compiling such statistics around the time of World War II, the number of licensed drivers in California dropped last year. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, there are 64,100 fewer motorists taking to the streets, leaving that much more weaving room for the rest of us.

At least, that’s the theory. The reality is that even the loss of tens of thousands of drivers in the Golden State--however welcome--doesn’t amount to much when you consider that 20.1 million residents held valid driver’s licenses in 1994. The 64,100 drop was just that: a drop . . . in a very full bucket.

“Unhappily, it’s not good enough to do us any good,” DMV spokesman Evan Nossoff said of the decrease, which amounted to just 0.3%.

But the dip was a notable anomaly after 50 continuous years of growth in the number of people who can legally move around on four wheels in California. And if Los Angeles County is any kind of bellwether, it may mark the beginning of a downward trend for a state where observers think folks are born with driver’s licenses in their hands rather than silver spoons in their mouths.

In fact, if it weren’t for Los Angeles County, California would have experienced yet another net rise in the number of its licensed drivers. But Angelenos played the spoiler, because there were 91,000 fewer county residents with licenses in 1994--six times as many as in all other counties that posted net losses of drivers combined.

Then what about an improvement in our freeway flow?

Not a chance.

At the end of last year, 5.4 million of the 9.2 million people living in Los Angeles County carried driver’s licenses--about 59% of the county’s population.

“When you look at 91,000 out of 5 million, you’re looking at about 2%, which is a number so small it doesn’t make a blip on the screen,” said Nick Jones, senior engineer with Caltrans. “It’s not going to drastically reduce traffic.”

Also, it’s impossible to take Los Angeles in isolation from surrounding areas, because many of the motorists on our freeways and roads are commuters who live in Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, nearly all of which gained drivers last year. In addition, trucking routes flow right through the City of Angels.

“Everything kind of goes through L.A.,” said Jones. “It’s a center point, a tremendous draw.”

Traffic in the region has actually stayed flat since about 1990, largely because of the depressed economy, Jones said.

During that time, however, the number of drivers in the county has steadily fallen. Beginning in 1991, although the state total of licensed drivers increased, the number decreased in Los Angeles County.

The trend reflected an escalating pace of residents who decided to quit the county altogether in favor of greener pastures. True, overall population in Los Angeles County still climbed, but that sprang from the birthrate rather than immigration, foreign or domestic.

And, of course, babies still are not eligible to drive until age 16--and some wait longer than that. In fact, contrary to a time-honored custom--teen-agers eagerly getting in line at the DMV the morning they turn 16--one of the contributing factors to the drop in drivers may be youths putting off applying for a license.

It’s not the teen-agers who have changed, but the state’s financial picture over the last few years.

Strapped for cash, California no longer pays for its youngsters to have behind-the-wheel driver’s training, a prerequisite for youths under 18 to earn a driver’s license. “That’s been a victim of the budget cuts,” said Nossoff at the DMV.

And many families cannot afford to send their teen-agers to private driving classes, which can cost up to $200 for just six hours of training.

So is California losing its luster as the car and driving capital of the world, where not to have a driver’s license practically amounts to sacrilege?

Hard to say--but perhaps the reputation wasn’t so deserved in the first place.

True, we have more drivers than any other state, and more than many nations. But that’s largely a function of our huge population, said Prof. Charles Lave, who teaches economics at UC Irvine.

After all, when you spread the 20 million licensed drivers over California’s population of 30 million, the number of licensed drivers per capita ranks 43rd out of the 50 states, according to federal statistics. In other words, licensed drivers make up a higher percentage of the population in 42 other states. And motorists in 28 other states drive more miles on average than we do.

“I don’t know what it means to say that California is in love with the car,” said Lave. “Every place in the world is in love with the car.”

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Fewer Licenses For the first time since World War II, the number of licensed drivers in California has dropped, a trend led by Los Angeles County. 5,418,200 licensed drivers 1994 Source: Dept. of Motor Vehicles