Safe Senior Drivers: A Guide for a Critical Time

Phil Berardelli

Description

The post-World War II generation, the Baby Boomers, are beginning to retire at a time when U.S. life expectancy has never been higher. As a result, the population of senior drivers is exploding, a phenomenon that will create potentially massive problems for our traffic planners, highway safety engineers and healthcare providers, as more and more Americans in their 70s, 80s and even 90s continue to ply the roadways. Or will it?

In Safe Senior Drivers, a Guide for a Critical Time, five highly experienced writers take on this serious question. The result is a unique, invaluable tool for keeping yourself – and your aging parent – as safe as possible on the roads. Anchored by editor Phil Berardelli, author of two of the best books ever written about driving safety, and packed with useful information and references, Safe Senior Drivers is the clearest, most comprehensive resource available on what indeed is a critical time in the life of everyone who intends to stay behind the wheel and function well in today's driving environment.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Santé du quotidien
• Health Issues
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Disease

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 09 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780984651245
• Langue: English

Extrait

SAFE SENIOR DRIVERS: A Guide for a Critical Time
 
Copyright © 2012 Phil Berardelli
 
All Rights Reserved
 
Published in eBook format by Mountain Lake Press
 
http://mountainlakepress.com
 
Converted by http://eBookIt.com
 
ISBN 13: 978-0-9846512-4-5
 
Cover design by Michael Hentges
 


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
CONTENTS
 
INTRODUCTION
 
PART I: THE ROAD TO DRIVING RETIREMENT
 
1. A Growing Problem – or Not?
 
2. America’s Car-Centered Lifestyle
 
3. Auto nomy
 
4. Warning Signs
 
5. The Daisy Decelerator
 
6. Our Driving Brethren Aren’t Helping
 
7. Flavors of Aggression
 
PART II: NEVER TOO LATE TO DRIVE SMARTER
 
8. Return to the Basics
 
9. For Us, Maybe Even More Important
 
10. Don’t Forget 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: REACHING THE END OF THE ROAD
 
14. A Farewell to Driving
 
15. There’s Light at the End of the Tunnel
 
16. When Dad Stopped Driving
 
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
 
NOTES
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 that buck, 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 over 15 years. First, I began a detailed observation of our society’s driving habits 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, I updated as an ebook in 2011, and the lessons from which I have adapted here.
Safe Senior Drivers: A Guide for a Critical Time is the third in the series, and it’s quite different. For one thing, I decided early on that the subject was far too complex to cover on my own. Helping a senior driver – which I will soon become myself – is not nearly as clear-cut a task 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 our collective bad habits.
No. Driving among seniors is the most difficult and complex problem of all.
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.
Dr. Robert A. Comunale, a physician in family practice for many years, discusses how advancing age can translate into specific physical liabilities.
John Matras, a lifelong auto writer, examines how technology is helping to extend the tenure of and protect our 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 this issue can affect families.
Together, we hope to give you the best tools available to manage driving in your senior years, or to manage the transition of your parent or loved one into a less active – and eventually inactive – driving reality.
PART I: THE ROAD TO DRIVING RETIREMENT
1. 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 become 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 reached retirement age. That bumper crop of postwar babies born between 1946 and 1964 has already begun to swell the portion of Americans age 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 and over – and many will still be driving. Our culture on wheels is dug in, as those of us in our golden years hang onto our car keys longer and rack up more miles than ever.
The prospect worries 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. 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.
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.
 
Misconceptions
All true, but do these incidents really justify widespread fear? Well, yes and no. Yes, because on an individual level the problems of a senior 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 other than teens, they’re also more likely than younger drivers to reside in dense urban areas, where crash rates 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.
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, because they 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 decidedly mixed. They aren’t the menace they’re sometimes portrayed to be. In fact, there’s even some good news: Over the past decade the crash risk for senior drivers has been declining more than for middle-age drivers. Between 1997 and 2008, for example, fatal passenger vehicle crashes per senior driver fell by 37 percent, compared with a 23-percent drop among drivers ages 35-54. Moreover, drivers ages 80 and up experienced an even steeper decline : 49 percent.
These trends were quite unexpected. If fatal crash rates for senior drivers had mirrored the trends for middle-age drivers during these years, about 10,000 additional seniors would