Author: Evan Carter
Imagine. Imagine a car traveling safely down the highway, cruising in an open lane at a speed of 70 miles per hour, when suddenly, with no warning, a late model silver sedan traveling around 35 miles per hour drifts over into the open lane. This slow driver just caused an accident. Maybe the driver was someone putting on makeup in the mirror, or maybe it was a distracted teen, but in the next 20 years, the likelihood that the driver was someone over the age of 70 will triple. In that case, the accident was avoidable. That elderly driver could have been screened for deteriorating judgment and taken off the road.
The New York Times reports that the number of elderly citizens in the U.S. is about to skyrocket, and more members of this aging generation call the suburbs home than any generation before. This presents a problem. While members of previous generations had the option to quit driving, this generation will not.
Suburban life necessitates the automobile as a means of transportation. Very few American cities have adequate public transportation systems, and even fewer have public transit that accommodates the suburbs.
This means the vast majority of these aging drivers will have no option but to stay on the road. Our society has yet to create a preemptive system by which to revoke driving privilege, so it is completely up to an individual whether they will drive as they age.
The New York Times published the results of research conducted by David Loughran and the RAND Corporation. Drivers age 65 and older are 16 percent more likely to cause a traffic accident than drivers ages 25 to 64. This significant difference exposes a need for a screening process by which authorities could remove hazardous drivers from the road before a fatal accident occurs.
The same study reports that “drivers ages 15-24 who account for 13 percent of licensed drivers […] cause 43 percent of all traffic accidents.” This would seem to say that teen drivers are the largest threat to other motorists. But teens grow into adults ages 25-64, which means they become the least threatening group of drivers.Teen drivers are honing their driving skills as they get older. Elderly drivers are experiencing the opposite. They are becoming less aware and overly cautious.
Just as our society decides when a person is skilled enough to begin driving, we should establish a criteria for when a driver is too old to continue.
Tara Parker-Hope of the New York Times reports that “older drivers are also less likely to cause drunken driving accidents,” but the statistics she presents expose something that she fails to recognize. She wrote that six percent of people involved in fatal accidents were age 70 and over and had alcohol in their systems, while 41 percent of fatalities in those age 16 to 59 had been drinking.
Her argument is that older drivers are safer because they drink and drive less often than teenagers. I argue that old drivers are more of a hazard because 94 percent of the time they cause an accident, it is not the result of alcohol impaired judgment.
It doesn’t take alcohol and drugs to cause an accident involving senior citizens, the accidents just happen. It takes a poor decision of drinking and driving to cause 41 percent of younger fatal accidents. Old drivers are making fatal decisions in an unaltered state, so they should be pulled from the roadway.
When reaching age 65, drivers should be required to complete a routine screening process such as a quick written test of traffic rules and display a clean driving record. This should be required every three years until age 75, when authorities should require a driving test, much like the one an eager 16-year-old is tasked with. This driving test should be required every five years after 75 until the driver either fails or pulls him- or herself from the roadway.
Evan Carter is a junior Economics major. He can be reached at carter@oxy.edu.
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