BunnyGirl: *However, I have seen the effect on a person of having a license rescinded due to age: its horrible. This woman’s (a single woman, age 80, lived alone, etc) car was her ONLY means of transportation in a huge city that was getting bigger by the minute. *
Now this is the part that absolutely horrifies me. She lives in a “huge city that’s getting bigger by the minute” and her car is her ONLY means of transportation? That’s appalling! One of the advantages to living in a “huge city” is supposed to be that the high population density means you don’t need a car to get around and can get access to lots of markets and services without traveling long distances or being isolated from your neighbors (which is part of why they’ve traditionally been popular places for older people to live).
Folks, I have to point out that part of this whole older-driver problem (which Cannon, for example, is correct to note is not a universal problem among older drivers, although I wish he could have done it without calling people “putz”) is our society’s pervasive dependence on the automobile. Yes, I realize we’re a big and spread-out country, and yes, I know that there are many regions where it’s much more cost-effective to depend on private cars than to install systems of mass transit, and yes, I support your right to prefer cars to trains or buses and to live where you like and to drive what you want.
BUT: there are distinct advantages to balancing this “transit individualism” with high-density areas where residents really don’t need cars. We’ve exacerbated the dangerous-older-driver problem by letting our cities deteriorate to the point where lots of older people wouldn’t want to live there. As people have moved out to ever-more-distant suburbs (even those who still depend on the city as commuters), municipal tax strategies haven’t changed to keep up with this “flight of the tax base”. Revenues shrink, services go down, suburban flight accelerates, and you’re left with a much less livable “inner city” (and lately, as suburban flight sprawls farther and farther out, similarly depressed “inner-ring suburbs” too).
What’s the result? You have lots of aging people living in suburban areas where owning and operating a car is absolutely mandatory if you don’t want to be housebound. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that when operating a car becomes too difficult for them, they don’t see any alternatives that will still give them some freedom and independence. They don’t have local public transit, they can’t afford to keep a chauffeur, their kids don’t live close enough or don’t have the time to drive them everywhere they want to go, and they’re terrified of lapsing into isolation—so they keep on driving. And eventually, lots of them have accidents.
I’m lucky in this respect: my mom (now in her mid-seventies) voluntarily decided that she didn’t want to drive regularly anymore and was able to afford moving to a city which does actually have a lively urban economy and good mass transit, where she really can enjoy the places and people around her without needing to drive. But what are you going to do when your parents start to lose their driving skills but don’t know how to contemplate life without a car?
pkbites, you’re absolutely correct that driving isn’t a “right”; but in practical terms, for most people, it’s pretty much a necessity. If we’re going to take away older people’s driving privileges when they can’t drive safely anymore, we need to find some ways of making driving less necessary for them, too. Just saying “Ah shuddup Grandpa, your independence is meaningless compared to other people’s lives: get off the road and stay home!” is not good social policy. (Note added in preview: Fillet’s suggestions about lobbying for “senior transportation,” on the other hand, are extremely sensible.)
