7: Older Drivers

The older driver “vision” embraced by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, 2003) is to have “a transportation system that offers safe mobility to all people and allows older people to remain independent and to age in place … to extend safe driving and to offer other and convenient and affordable transportation options when driving and walking options must be curtailed.” This is quite a challenge for an agency focusing on safety. Older driver – typically defined as 65+  years old – issues are unique because they involve the following seven, often contradictory, features:

Since the beginning of mass production of automobiles at the beginning of the 20th century, life expectancy in the Western world has increased by 28 years. The declining birth rates in the western world coupled with the increase in life expectancy makes older people in general, and older drivers in particular, the fastest growing driver age group in the population. In the beginning of this century, in the U.S. there were approximately 15 million people 65 years old and older and they constituted approximately 12 percent of the population. By 2030 their number is expected to double to 30 million and they will constitute approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population (NHTSA, 2003). This shift in the make-up of the population is dramatically illustrated in the age pyramids for 1960, 1990, and (the estimated figures for) 2020, reproduced Figure 7-1. In the top panel, the post-World War II baby boomers are the bars of the 15-24 years old (that follow the low birth rates in the decade immediately preceding them). By the year 2020 the baby boomers will be 75 years old, and they and the next two generations that followed them will constitute the top three bars in the bottom panel of Figure 7-1. Note how big these bars are relative to those of the same age groups in 1960. This trend is expected to continue, so that by 2030 the age distribution will be almost uniform, with nearly as many people over 80 years old as 60-64 years old (Dellinger, 2012) (For a dynamic visualization of the change in the population age, see http://www.census.gov/popclock/).