A week later, on the same street in Stoughton, Mass., where his father lives, a 4-year-old girl was hit by a car and killed. The driver was 88 years old.
Joyce is a state senator in Massachusetts. For five years, he's been trying to get a bill passed that would require elderly drivers to undergo vision and road tests every five years. State legislatures often defeat such proposals because of opposition from older residents and the AARP. They argue that motorists should be judged by their ability, not their age, and that any stricter testing should apply to all equally. Anything else is perceived as ageism, a step down that slippery slope toward second-class citizenship for old people.
As an older driver myself, I don't buy it, and there's a chance, finally, the Massachusetts Legislature may not, either.
After a summer in which older drivers in the state were involved in a dozen serious accidents, including two fatalities, Joyce's latest bill has been taken up by the House Ways and Means Committee. If it were to become law, Massachusetts would join 26 other states that treat older drivers differently. Regulations range from requiring applicants for license renewal to take road tests starting at age 75 (Illinois) to withdrawal of the mail renewal option for older drivers (more than a dozen states).
Brian Ray, AP
University of Iowa researchers used a driving simulator in April as part of a study attempting to ascertain the driving abilities in elderly drivers.
The debate over age-related restrictions is contentious and confusing. Individual older motorists are involved in fewer fatal crashes than members of other age groups. But in terms of the number of miles they travel, drivers 75 and older are involved in many more fatal crashes than any age group except 16-to-24-year-olds. What distinguishes older drivers -- the reason why stricter testing across the board makes no sense -- is the aging process. It reduces our driving skills: Vision and hearing weaken along with reaction time; arthritis limits our mobility; dementia clouds our judgment.
The vast majority of older drivers adjust to these changes by exercising greater care and limiting themselves to local and daytime driving -- but too many of them don't. Identifying that dangerous minority and getting them out from behind a wheel should be a national priority. The problem is only going to get worse: By 2025, a quarter of all drivers will be 65 or older.
I understand that the loss of a driver's license is a traumatic experience. Toward the end of life as at the beginning, the car is a powerful symbol of freedom and independence. I don't even drive that much anymore, but if somebody tried to take away my license, you better believe I'd kick up a fuss. And for many thousands of older people who lack a reasonable transportation alternative, the loss of a car goes way beyond the symbolic -- it removes their access to stores, doctors and friends, and can lead to isolation, depression and an early death.
A study of a group of drivers 63 to 97 years of age, reported in the Journals of Gerontology, found that those who stopped driving were four to six times more likely to die over a three-year period than those who were still driving, even after controlling for health status.
So here's how I want to see us older drivers treated: Keep us on the road, safely, as long as possible, and get us off the road as soon as possible once we start driving unsafely.
That means setting up more and better trip-wires such as:
• Convincing families to seek professional help if they can't convince us to give up our keys.
• Convincing police to turn us in at the same rate they turn in younger drivers.
• Convincing more doctors to report us when we have medical symptoms that prevent safe driving.
• Giving us more frequent license renewals and more diligent testing of vision and driving ability.
Once unsafe older drivers are identified, their particular problems can be addressed. In some cases, for example, their cars can be modified -- wider mirrors installed, extensions added to pedals for shorter drivers. They can be restricted to daytime or local driving. They can take computer-based training to improve their "useful field of view," the amount of information you can process in a single glance, which is a key measure of your safe driving ability. For one group of older drivers, their risk of a crash was cut by 50 percent after 10 hours' worth of this cognitive training. And when older drivers' licenses are finally taken away, there should be in place some affordable, convenient alternative means of transportation they can use other than having to rely on friends or family.
That kind of transport does not exist today for hundreds of thousands of isolated older people. Various approaches are being tested, but like so much of the country's efforts to cope with older drivers, they are too little too late. A fire needs to be lit.
Meanwhile, as an older driver, I stand ready to do whatever is necessary to ensure that I'm still driving safely. Like Brian Joyce's dad, I don't want to hit one of my grandchildren -- or anyone else for that matter.
