Among the many slang coinages of Gen Z, the term “passenger princess” is perhaps the least confounding to me. Yes, the young people are not learning to drive and are turning up their noses at what was once the great moment of youthful freedom. The stalled engines of Gen Z are a matter of some social concern. Why, various writers wonder, aren’t Zoomers getting their licenses? Is it anxiety? Is it the phones? Is it part of a general failure to launch?
I have never shared this confusion. Cars are an expensive drag to maintain, they are almost uniformly hideous, and walking is so very pleasant. I resisted getting my license for 15 years. But finally, driving caught up with me. Now, for reasons still unclear to me, I am legally permitted to operate a motor vehicle on public roads.
I did my first driving in a part of the world where, for long stretches, your only competition on the road might be an occasional cow (or perhaps a moose, if you have done something to incur divine wrath). This gave me an inflated sense of my own abilities. I am quite capable of avoiding a cow. When there are no other drivers on the road, I perform admirably. In driving, as in moral life, it’s really other people that pose the problem.
Possibly, my attitude toward other drivers is at fault. When I look in my rearview mirror — an office I dutifully remind myself to perform, against my inclination — and I see someone behind me, a part of my mind, deeper and stronger than rational thought, immediately clocks that they are trying to get me. What does “get me” entail, exactly? I don’t know, but I refuse to be got. “How do I shake this guy?” I mutter, as we make our leisurely way down the road toward Wegmans. They never catch up with me, never get me; I manage to keep them a few car lengths behind at all times. But they try. They try.
If the practice of driving cultivates individual paranoia, it also amplifies the specific sociality of a given region. For example, driving in Philadelphia is very different from driving in the Intermountain West. It is not only that the more urban an environment becomes, the less dignified and optimal driving is as a mode of navigation. And it is not only that people in Philadelphia drive in a vigorously demented manner. Out west, and, I believe, in many parts of the developed world, people will honk at you if you are committing egregious violations, attempting bizarre stunts, or otherwise putting yourself or others in immediate danger of being run off the road. In Philadelphia, people will honk at you for driving only 5 miles above the speed limit. They will honk at you for waiting to go until the light turns green.
Then there is the problem of signage. In Philadelphia, you cannot rely on relevant road information to be accurately marked. It might once have been marked and since worn away without replacement. It might be marked but voided by the fact that everyone decided to ignore it. It might not be marked at all, because, again, everyone knows that lane is for turning. It is humbling to realize that there is a layer of shared and important knowledge of your home that you have never accessed. What everyone knows will kill you if you don’t.
The signage problem, in itself, doesn’t bother me too much. Signage confuses me — not just in any ill-explicated instance, but as a general category. The part of my mind that makes decisions before I am aware of them is much stronger than the part of my mind that makes decisions by assessing the environment, processing relevant information while excluding the irrelevant, and making a considered judgment based on evidence. I am very easy to defeat in any game of strategy.
I try to avoid confusion at all costs when driving, because my instinctive response to confusion is to slam on the gas as hard as I can until the problem is solved. Whether the problem is solved because I have escaped the confusing situation or solved because I am dead is not, as far as I can tell, a relevant distinction to my instincts. It works about as well on the road as it does in life.
As you can probably deduce from the fact that I am alive to write this dismal account, I have learned to curb this reflex when behind the wheel; my hope is that this change bleeds back into the rest of my habitus, and learning to drive becomes a project of moral reform rather than merely a penitential exercise. Even so, pitfalls remain.
When I drive, I will see a sign giving me some important information to be applied to a decision point 15 feet ahead, which I am approaching at 40 miles per hour. Since these instructions are written in big, stupid letters and short sentences that a child could sound out, many people might assume that they are basically impossible to misunderstand. These people underestimate my commitment to close reading. While I am trying to understand the import of the text (wait, is it “do not enter” over there, or “do not enter” over here?), to parse the rules of the road and their application, there is a decent chance that I have zipped along into a problematic situation. It is amazing what you can get yourself into while you try to remember the rules for left-hand turns. Another humbling realization: not only do the analytical and decisive parts of my mind suffer from communication problems, but the analytical and gross motor coordination sides are barely on speaking terms.
To prevent myself from becoming dangerously confused by signage, I like to play a little game called “Apocalypse Road Trip.” The rules are easy: an apocalyptic catastrophe has wiped out human society as we know it. There is no more law and order, no more rules of the road. The only rule is: make reasonable decisions that do not obstruct the flow of traffic or put yourself and others at risk. My driving improved enormously when I started playing Apocalypse Road Trip. Once you assume society has collapsed due to zombie bird flu, left-hand turns become very simple.
It is the Ikea bookshelf all over again. I can build Ikea furniture, although I prefer not to, so long as I figure it out myself and do not, under any circumstances, consult the instructions. If I read the instructions, I will inevitably miss something important, become confused about something very obvious, and be found hours later dripping bitter tears onto clean, cheap, modernist pine.
In the case of the Ikea bookshelf, and when backing out of a tight space, it is often a man who saves the day. When I think of how many men with gray beards under baseball caps have seen my distress, hitched up their jeans, and ambled out of their yards with barely concealed mirth and a strong determination to assist, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. Someone is going to suggest I should feel bad about this: Well, I don’t. I have never felt that my general competence as a woman depended on the hated automobile. Besides, men love helping women, and they especially love helping women by being better at something than they are. In the discourse, I frequently encounter people wringing their hands over the fact that women have jobs now and the consequences for men. Pundits will moan all day long that men are adrift for want of opportunities to condescend to us. But are they doing anything about it? No. But I am, every time I ram my bumper into the embankment.
The extent to which “learning to drive” has improved my baseline driving abilities is less than you might assume. There is a vast fractional wasteland between zero and one. But obtaining my license did transform my experience of car travel in one respect: It made me an extremely nervous passenger.
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Before I became street legal, car trips were blissful. I stared out the window at the rolling hills. I fiddled with the radio. I kept my driver alert and engaged with a flow of brilliant conversation (if they were not always as grateful for this assistance as they should have been, I bore no grudges). Now, when I ride shotgun with my siblings — all of whom, to be clear, are much, much, better drivers than I — I engage in what anthropologists call “aunt behaviors.” I find my feet rooting for phantom pedals. I tense up in my seat, waiting for collisions. I mutter abortive warnings under my breath when merging onto the highway. I conspicuously pray my rosary.
This is the real danger of getting your license — that you can never again be a passenger, only a temporarily embarrassed driver. Was it worth it? Ask me when I have logged enough hours as a bad driver that I start logging a few as a mediocre one. Ask me in June when I’m driving through Wyoming. Or better yet, ask me in five minutes when I’ve got my bumper disentangled from these rhododendrons.
Clare Coffey is a writer from Pennsylvania. Her work appears in the New Atlantis, the Bulwark, Plough, and elsewhere.
