My mom likes to say that being old isn't hard, but getting there is rough.
Not that she would know, of course.)
For many, one of the roughest parts of aging is giving up driving. Sacrificing the car keys also means sacrificing the freedom to go, comfortably, the places you want to go. As a new generation creeps into the "should you really be driving?" age group, it's no surprise that greater attention is being paid to the mobility needs of older adults, as with the newly-released white paper from AASTHO and TRIP Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving the Mobility and Safety of Older Americans.
The paper offers a series of recommendations related to road design, education, licensing, vehicle design, and alternative transportation modes that aim to preserve older adults' ability to move throughout their communities on their own.
Unfortunately (though perhaps not surprisingly for a paper written by a highway association), several of the key recommendations do little to improve the overall safety of the road, and may in fact harm more vulnerable users like pedestrians and cyclists.
Let's begin by examining one of fundamental premises underlying these recommendations, that in the name of safety we must redesign our roads to accommodate older drivers. The paper emphasizes that older drivers are disproportionately represented in fatal crashes. This may be true, but that has more to do with these drivers' frailty than unforgiving roads. In fact, older drivers tend to self-regulate their driving (e.g. drive only during the day, choose "easier" routes), which largely negates the effect of decreased physical abilities on their driving skills.
And let's not forget that while older drivers may be likelier to cause a crash than other adults, the really dangerous ones are younger drivers. According to one RAND study, older drivers may be 16 percent more likely to cause a crash, but younger drivers are 188 percent more likely to do so.
Not that she would know, of course.)
For many, one of the roughest parts of aging is giving up driving. Sacrificing the car keys also means sacrificing the freedom to go, comfortably, the places you want to go. As a new generation creeps into the "should you really be driving?" age group, it's no surprise that greater attention is being paid to the mobility needs of older adults, as with the newly-released white paper from AASTHO and TRIP Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving the Mobility and Safety of Older Americans.
The paper offers a series of recommendations related to road design, education, licensing, vehicle design, and alternative transportation modes that aim to preserve older adults' ability to move throughout their communities on their own.
Unfortunately (though perhaps not surprisingly for a paper written by a highway association), several of the key recommendations do little to improve the overall safety of the road, and may in fact harm more vulnerable users like pedestrians and cyclists.
Let's begin by examining one of fundamental premises underlying these recommendations, that in the name of safety we must redesign our roads to accommodate older drivers. The paper emphasizes that older drivers are disproportionately represented in fatal crashes. This may be true, but that has more to do with these drivers' frailty than unforgiving roads. In fact, older drivers tend to self-regulate their driving (e.g. drive only during the day, choose "easier" routes), which largely negates the effect of decreased physical abilities on their driving skills.
And let's not forget that while older drivers may be likelier to cause a crash than other adults, the really dangerous ones are younger drivers. According to one RAND study, older drivers may be 16 percent more likely to cause a crash, but younger drivers are 188 percent more likely to do so.
