Quote:
Originally Posted by Shawn
This is a big part of it I feel. I got my MA permit on my 16th birthday and passed the driver's exam about a week after I turned 16 and a half, the earliest you could get a license in Mass in 1998. I could legally drive around in my 1992 Chevy Lumin (the "a" fell off) with 4 other 16 year-old high school sophomores. And I drove my then-14 year-old brother to school with me every morning. That's insane. We were not mature enough for that and to this day I wonder how we all lived through high school, given some of the absolutely idiotic shit we did with our cars.
A few years later, Mass wisely implemented the junior operator license. Now kids could only drive by themselves, and they couldn't be on the road past 12:30 AM.
And yes, we pretty much all had cars. Most of them were older models we'd buy from our parents for $1 and then we'd be added to their insurance policies. This was in a solidly middle-class town too, not a wealthy Metro West burb. You pretty much had to have a car then if you wanted to work after school or during the summer; you can't have mom and dad drive you to and from your work when they've taken both their cars to work already.
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I went to high school in Ontario. I lived in an upper middle class suburban area and the high schools I went to were either in suburban locations or on the fringes of the inner city. They all had some degree of parking available for students but I don't recall there being parking passes or anything like that.
But coming to school by driving yourself certainly wasn't very common. That was something we saw in the movies - American of course. Kids coming to high school in luxury sports cars (as in the movies again) was non-existent.
Sure, some kids did but they were quite rare. I don't recall any of my friends doing that. At the most, it was more like a special treat, as in: "I've got the car today! Let's go to McDonald's for lunch!"
And at the time I went to high school (late 80s) Ontario actually had a 13th grade so we were in high school until we were about 18 and some were even 19. Still, most Grade 13 kids didn't drive to come to school. It seems like driving to your place of study didn't become a thing until you finished high school and went to community college or university. And even then that depended on the location of the institution.
That said, as soon as we were 16, cars driven by friends became very common for evening and weekend outings. There was usually someone available to give you a lift if you didn't have one yourself.
We still used transit on occasion to go out into my early 20s but that was mostly to avoid the drunk driving issue.