9mo ago

How older Americans are grappling with hanging up their car keys

www.cbsnews.com

Summary

At 85, Vonciel Gray decided to stop driving after a stressful experience, joining millions of older Americans facing a loss of independence. Her son, Kurt, a traffic safety expert, helps families navigate the difficult conversation about when to stop driving.

With an aging population, experts warn of a “mobility gap” as older adults seek alternatives to driving.

Joseph Coughlin’s MIT Age Lab explores how vehicle technology can aid or distract older drivers, yet acknowledges that tech can’t always replace the need for older adults to relinquish their keys for safety.

41 comments

They need to treat the root of the problem by fixing up public transit.
- That works if you live in a city. I live in a town of 8900, and my elderly father who developed epilepsy and can no longer drive, lives on his farm 20 miles away. Public transportation will not do anything for him.
  
  In my state there are rural transportation buses. It's not perfect, but they get used a lot.
  
  A town I grew up in had 9k people... Yet had several bus lines just fine. Why are you accepting excuses like that? I could have gotten on a bus from one grandparent to another 2 villages over (with a change).
  You need to get it out of your head and stop saying "it can't happen" like rest of the world hasn't solved this decades ago. The sooner you realise you're not special edge case, the sooner you'll get close to what rest of the world takes for granted.
  
  Maybe he shouldn't be living on his own then.
  
  Public transport could do something for him if it was invested in more and we valued the community enough to provide better senior transport options.
  
  It mostly certainly could.
  
  So what do you do? My Mom lives in a very car dependent area and I haven’t found any options. While she doesn’t drive often, she shouldn’t at all. However I haven’t found anything besides Uber gift cards and she won’t use them (plus that’s expensive)
  
  Your family has chosen to live in a place where public transit may not be effective. Your personal choices do not invalidate the benefits that public transport has for the large majority of people. Even if you don’t use it, you benefit from dropped emission levels.
  
  This. I'm in a town with a population under 2500, and the nearest city is around 30 miles away. Even the small local grocer that just carries basic goods is something like 5 miles away.
- It's crazy how hard it is to show Americans that public transit helps with so many issues in our communities. We've had generations of people now who have never even ridden a bus. Our cities were demolished for cars so we're building our way out of a huge infrastructure deficit in the face of a populace who doesn't understand just how damaging cars are to everything around.
The flip side of the headline: "How society is grappling with older drivers refusing to hang up their keys"
My grandfather was allowed to drive a car in Florida after a stroke he never fully recovered from, while still nonverbal. And my grandmother, who couldn't drive, had him keep doing it.
That should not be allowed, no matter how hard it is to get around without a car. There have to be better solutions for seniors in public transportation deserts than Uber/Lyft.
- I'm a reasonably fit dude in his 30s and I sit down to pee because I'm lazy.
  Also I got a shower bench because those fuckers are comphy.
- Standing up to pee is probably connected in their head to being a man, so not being able to stand up and pee is a loss of their manhood.
  
  Toxic masculinity is deeply Boomer. We have all been tangentially affected by it for decades.
- The female equivalent is probably hoverers who piss all over the toilet seat
It's a tough call. Last bit of independence for someone feeling their world getting smaller. Anecdotally, both my father and father-in-law damaged their cars (one hit the highway median after dozing off) and their wives told them they couldn't afford to replace the cars. Fortunately, nobody got hurt but it could have been a lot worse.
Having seen my mom, and now the mom of my ex, devolve into dangerous drivers, I will trust my kids on this. If they say I am not driving well, I will not drive. Luckily everything is nearby, I haven't needed to drive much since we moved close to my work.
Walking distance to hospital, doctor, restaurants, dentist, bank is online, driving has become a convenience not a need, thankfully.
We need to give road tests every 5 years or so, to everyone who holds a driving license. My road test was literally more than 40 years ago, how do they even know I can still drive safely?
- Yet you appear to be willing to stop driving when it’s clearly a problem. There’s a good sized segment if the population who will do the right thing, given a chance. How do we give people a chance? How do we get more within walking distance, improve accessibility, find reasonable cost transportation, affordable delivery services? How do we establish “third places” where people can exercise a social life without driving there?
  
  Not sure. For me, I have a large family, and do yoga classes in person, work at the office, not from home, go to get coffee always at the same place so see the same people, and have need for more alone time than I ever get, so it hasn't been an issue yet. Transportation would help a lot here. I used to see old people at aerobics classes downtown when I did those, so group exercise I do think is valuable.
  Not to get political but not sure what will happen now with the large family, as Florida gets ever more backwards the kids may get more distributed in other places. We have a house I love in a neighborhood I love, in a blue-leaning city, and don't want to abandon it. They are second generation but instead of the progress I saw during my adulthood and their childhood, but as they reached adulthood now the pendulum is swinging back.
I'm just thinking of that helmet cam clip of the race car driver. "I'm keeping the pedal all the way down until I see a checkered flag or God."

41 comments