Can A Driver Be Too Old?

By James Carney

In Tuscola, Ill., Pearl Kamm, 77, began a road test to renew her driver's license last summer by backing the car over a curb and into a tree. Then she plowed through the plate-glass windows of the driver-testing center, killing a woman who was waiting to take a vision test and injuring three others.

As America's population grows older, such highway horror stories are becoming more common. Currently 12% of the population is 65 or older, a figure expected to reach 17% in the next 40 years. While dangerous drivers come in all ages -- the most menacing, in fact, are still the youngest -- there is a growing nationwide effort to ensure that older people with licenses either drive safely or get off the road.

Until recently, it was widely believed that older drivers were the safest because they are involved in the fewest accidents overall of any age group. But those statistics do not weigh the fact that senior citizens tend to drive fewer miles than their younger counterparts. A 1988 study by the Transportation Research Board and the National Research Council discovered that elderly drivers rank second only to 16-to-24-year-olds in the number of accidents per mile driven. Similarly, the Insurance Information Institute reports that drivers 75 and over are more accident-prone than all but those under 25.

While younger drivers often suffer most from poor judgment, the safety problems of elderly drivers are more likely to be rooted in the normal processes of aging: diminishing vision and hearing, slowing reflexes and decreasing attention spans. Experts find a link between these kinds of physical degeneration and the driving errors the elderly most often commit: failing to yield the right-of-way, making overly wide left turns, and crashing into other vehicles when backing up.

These are familiar problems to some residents of California, Arizona and Florida, all states with large colonies of retirees. In Florida 17% of all motorists are 65 and over, and an astonishing 22,268 are 90 or over. In the wealthier districts of metropolises, like Tampa-St. Petersburg and Miami, the profusion of elderly drivers has acquired an unkind nickname: the "cataracts and Cadillacs" syndrome. In 1982 a public hue and cry arose over the driving record of an 81-year-old Miami Beach woman who surrendered her license after a 39-month streak during which she struck eleven people, killing three and critically injuring five.

Before the advent of age-discrimination laws, 14 states passed legislation requiring older drivers to take tests to get their licenses renewed. In Pennsylvania, where the percentage of fatal accidents involving the elderly increased from 7% to 10% between 1985 and 1987, the Department of Transportation randomly selects as many as 1,500 senior citizens due for license renewal and calls them in for medical, vision, written and possible driving tests. As a result, 20% of the licenses are revoked, voluntarily surrendered or subjected to such restrictions as limiting the driver to daytime hours.

After a proposed license-renewal law aimed at the elderly foundered on charges of age discrimination, Florida enacted regulations ordering all new residents, regardless of age, to pass both written and driving tests. "There's a great need to gradually restrict licensing," says Jane Lange, director of the medical-review program for Arizona's department of motor vehicles. "People age at different rates, so, ideally, it should be done on a case-by-case basis."

Attempts to stiffen requirements for older drivers can collide with other concerns. Many auto-insurance companies offer discount rates to drivers over 65 because they tend to drive less frequently and to avoid hazardous situations like rush-hour traffic and bad weather. Another issue is compassion: depriving many senior citizens of their licenses would amount to robbing them of their independence. "The use of a car is particularly important to older citizens," says Florida Congressman Claude Pepper, 88. "It's a vital link to the outside world."

Perhaps the best way to reconcile safety and mobility is to teach elderly motorists to compensate for the physical liabilities that often come with age. Since 1979, more than a million senior drivers have completed the American Association of Retired Persons's "55 Alive/Mature Driving" program, an eight-hour driver-education course taught in 17,000 classrooms across the U.S. for a nominal fee. Says Michael Seaton, creator of the A.A.R.P. program: "Older drivers want to be safe on the road. Most have never had a high school driver's-education class, and they enjoy the course." As the A.A.R.P. program and ones like it expand, so too will the odds that older drivers will safely enjoy the open road well into their golden years.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: Accidents per 100 drivers in each age group

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and Bruce Henderson/Miami