Drive On! Preserve and Prolong Your Time on the Road

Phil Berardelli

Description

Are you a Baby Boomer? A member of the post-World War II generation? Retiring or planning to retire at a time when U.S. life expectancy has never been higher?

If so, you're part of the exploding population of senior drivers on our highways. You're also helping to create potentially massive problems for our traffic planners, highway safety engineers and healthcare providers who are struggling to cope with the challenge of tens of millions of aging Americans plying the roadways.

Or are you?

In Drive On! six talented writers – most of them senior drivers themselves – tackle this question head-on. They sort through the many myths and misperceptions about senior drivers. They consult the best research available. And they draw on their own collective decades of experience to reach a surprising and welcome conclusion: You can stay safe behind the wheel for many years – if you follow their advice and learn from their insights. You will also enjoy their fascinating interviews, easy-to-use self-diagnostic quizzes and compelling personal stories, all packaged within this unique, concise and most entertaining little book.

If you're a senior driver, or about the become one, Drive On! is invaluable!

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780990808947
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Epigraphs
Introduction
PART I: THE SENIOR ROAD
1. Do We Have a Growing Problem - or Not?
2. America’s Car-Centered Lifestyle
3. Autonomy
4.Warning Signs
5. The Daisy Decelerator
6. Our Driving Brethren Aren’t Helping
7. Flavors of Aggression
PART II: DRIVE LONGER? DRIVE SMARTER
8. Return to Basics
9. For Us, Maybe Even More Important
10. Those Three Little Words
11. And a Bunch More to Live By
12. Stay Cool, Be Happy
13. Meanwhile, Technology Is Riding to the Rescue
PART III: WHEN THE TIME COMES
14. A Farewell to Driving?
15. There Is Light at the End of the Tunnel
16. My Family’s Story
About the Authors
Endnotes
DRIVE ON!
Preserve and Prolong Your Time on the Road
Copyright © 2016 Phil Berardelli - All Rights Reserved
ISBNs:
978-1-4956-0881-0 (Epub)
978-1-4956-0882-7 (Mobi)
978-1-4956-0883-4 (PDF)
Published in the United States of America
by D Street Books
a division of Mountain Lake Press
Mountain Lake Park, Maryland
Cover photo © Monkey Business Images
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photo-copying, recording or otherwise, without the express and written permission of the publisher.
The elderly don’t drive that badly; they’re just the only ones with time to do the speed limit.
- Jason Love
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.
- Dave Barry, “Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn”
Have you ever noticed when you’re driving that anyone who’s driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?
- George Carlin
When I die, I want to go peacefully like my grandfather did, in his sleep - not screaming, like the passengers in his car.
- Jack Handey
Introduction
by Phil Berardelli
I published my first book on safe-driving techniques in 1996. It was the natural outcome of an article I had written two years earlier for The Washington Post about teaching my daughters how to drive. When I began the project, I admit, I was interested more in making a buck than in the particular subject of the book. Such is the nature of freelance writing. Ideals are fine, but you’ve got to pay the bills. On the other hand, in order to make the effort pay, I had to produce something worth buying. So I set out to expand my original article into a detailed blueprint to help parents teach their teenagers to become, as the book’s eventual title stated, Safe Young Drivers .
Two things emerged from that process - along with a book that has remained in print and sold reliably for 20 years now. First, I began a detailed observation o that I have continued to this day. Second, I became and remain truly appalled by what I observed. As a society we are damned incompetent, dangerously so, behind the wheel, which is why tens of thousands of us die on the roads each year, and millions are injured. That assessment led me to my second book, The Driving Challenge: Dare to Be Safer and Happier on the Road , which I first published in 2001 and updated as an eBook in 2011. I have adapted some of its lessons here.
Drive On! is the third in the series, and it’s quite different. For one thing, I decided early on that the subject was too complex to cover on my own. Helping a senior driver - which I became myself three years ago - is not nearly as clear-cut as devising an instructional program for teens. It isn’t even as direct as analyzing the problem of aggressive driving and devising methods to combat that bad habit.
No. Driving among seniors is a more challenging task. That’s why I’ve called on five other authors, each of whom has amassed a particular field of expertise, to help me:
Dr. Allan F. Williams, former chief scientist for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, puts the senior-driving issue into perspective.
Lidia Wasowicz Pringle, my former colleague at United Press International and a specialist in health issues, focuses her formidable research and interviewing skills on the experiences of individual seniors and on organizations that have established programs to help our demographic.
Dr. Robert A. Comunale, a physician in family practice for many years, discusses how advancing age can translate into specific physical issues.
John Matras, a lifelong auto writer, examines how technology is helping to protect and extend the tenure of seniors on the road.
And Jessie Thorpe, my co-editor and publishing partner, connects the many themes of the book in a personal account of how they can affect families.
Together, we hope to give you the best tools available to manage driving in your senior years and, as the subtitle promises, Preserve and Prolong Your Time on the Road .
Safe and happy miles - and many more of them!
PART I: THE SENIOR ROAD
1. Do We Have a Growing Problem - or Not?
by Dr. Allan F. Williams
I want to prolong driving as long as I can, so I belong to a group that walks 3 miles a day and to an aqua exercise class. I’m well aware of what happens when you can’t drive anymore, having a friend who had her keys taken away by her doctor when she was 84. She takes the bus whenever she can, but it gets very lonely when you can’t hop into your car whenever you’ve got places to go and people to see.
- Gini M., 73
Next time you’re at a social gathering, try bringing up the subject of senior drivers. Chances are you’ll elicit a story or two about someone’s aged parent who insists on staying behind the wheel despite obvious difficulties doing so.
It’s a common theme. Families across the country are involved in disagreements - sometimes wrenching and deeply divisive - over the driving competency of their senior members, with seniors typically claiming fewer problems than their children, relatives and friends have been noticing.
Get used to it. The Baby Boomers have moved into their golden years. That bumper crop of postwar babies born between 1946 and 1964 has already begun to swell the portion of Americans ages 65 and over - estimated by the 2010 Census to be 40 million, about 13 percent of the population. By 2030 the number of U.S. seniors is expected to reach 70 million, or 20 percent of the total. Of those, nearly 10 million will be age 85 or over - and many will still be driving.
Our culture on wheels is dug in, as those of us in this group hang onto our car keys longer and rack up more miles than ever. The prospect worries some highway safety officials. Will this surge in senior drivers be accompanied by a spike in motor vehicle crashes and fatalities after decades of decline?
It’s possible. One reason is crash demographics. The high rate among teenagers begins to decline among twentysomethings and continues to ease on a long, slow curve until about age 70, when the incidents start rebounding. Then they jump markedly after age 80. Fears about a coming crash epidemic caused by older drivers also get stoked occasionally by sensational incidents, such as the one in July 2003 when an 86-year-old man accelerated into a crowd of pedestrians at a Santa Monica, California, farmers’ market, killing 10 and injuring 63. 1
Lawyers claimed that their client had confused his car’s gas and brake pedals. Then there was the episode in October 2006 in Orlando, Florida, when an 84-year-old woman crashed her car through the front window of a Sears department store and plowed through to a cash-register counter, hitting a concrete support pillar. Rescuers found that the woman’s foot had become stuck between the gas pedal and the floor. 2
And in two separate but back-to-back incidents near Boston in June 2009, a 93-year-old man crashed into a Walmart entrance, injuring several shoppers, and a 73-year-old woman plowed into a group at a war memorial, injuring several more. 3 4
Misconceptions
All true, but do these incidents really justify widespread concern? Well, yes and no. Yes, because on an individual level the problems of an elderly driver can be serious and even dangerous, given his or her physical or mental impairments. No, because seniors as a group have the lowest crash, fatality and injury rates of any age range. Why the dichotomy? For one thing, even though seniors are driving more and longer, their licensing rates and average miles driven are lower than for younger drivers, and these trends should hold up even with the influx of the Baby Boomers. For another, though the oldest seniors post higher crash rates per miles driven than all age groups except teens, they’re also more likely than younger drivers to reside in dense urban areas, where crash rates in general are higher than on freeways and multilane roads.
Bottom line: If you examine the statistics carefully, you’ll find that all but the oldest seniors remain among the safest drivers on the road.
The Fragility Factor
There is one area where senior drivers tend to fare worse than their younger counterparts: injuries and fatalities. The reason is physiology. Our resident geriatric specialist, Dr. Robert Comunale, will cover this topic in more detail, but basically the problem has to do with the growing fragility of the human body that can begin as early as the 60s and accounts for more than half of senior deaths on the road. 5
In other words, many if not most of senior fatalities and injuries on the highway occur because the drivers’ aging bodies are beginning to let them down. They die in situations that younger drivers tend to survive. That goes for their passengers as well, who also tend to be seniors. And in terms of fatalities, senior drivers mostly harm themselves. The frightening instances I described above notwithstanding, seniors tend not to kill others on the road.
A Favorable Trend
Taken altogether, the crash-involvement picture for seniors is