At the beginning of this year, some 191,000 young people aged 17, 18 or 19 had a driving license.
That is about 14 percent less than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. At that time, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) noted 227,000 young people with the pink pass. However, more young people obtained a driving license in 2022 than in 2021.
At the same time, there are more elderly people with a driver’s license. According to the statistics bureau, this is due to the aging of the population and because older people are more often behind the wheel at a later age than in the past. The Netherlands has about 28,000 people aged 90 and older with a driving license.
City versus countryside
On 1 January of this year, eight out of ten Dutch people had a driving license. This varies considerably from municipality to municipality. The group of driving license holders is larger in rural municipalities than in the cities. Staphorst in Overijssel and Rozendaal in North Brabant, for example, have the most people with a driving license: about 92 percent of the over-17s are allowed behind the wheel.
Tubbergen and Renswoude in the province of Utrecht in Twente follow with about 91 percent. At 62 percent, driving license possession was lowest in Amsterdam, followed by Maastricht and The Hague (both around 64 percent).
