Organisation: Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA)
Date uploaded: 23rd November 2011
Date published/launched: April 2010
This paper identifies the main factors that can increase crash risk with age, as well as ways to help older drivers sustain a good level of safe mobility.
However, as people get older, it is inevitable that general health and fitness will begin to deteriorate – and this is what causes concern that older drivers may be at an increased risk of being involved in an accident.
There is therefore the need to help people maintain safe mobility as they get older. Road safety activities play a fundamental role in that by decreasing the risk of being involved in an accident. Ultimately, age related conditions can eventually mean that there is a point when an individual must give up driving.
However, one fundamental philosophy which this paper adopts is that policies which prematurely remove an elderly person’s ability to drive can have negative consequences for their health and quality of life. These consequences can outweigh the reduction in crash risk to the driver and the rest of society. In short, any intervention must be proportionate to the risk, and a judgement must be made as to whether an individual intervention gets the balance right.
Reported statistics indicate that the risk of being involved in an accident increases after the age of 70, and up to that age drivers are no more likely to cause a crash than to be the victim of another road user’s mistake. However, drivers over 70 and especially over 80 years, are more likely to be at fault when they crash.
Underlying health conditions, and some types of medication taken to treat those problems, are a more common factor in accidents involving older drivers. Indeed, a proportion of older driver fatalities occur when a driver dies of natural causes while driving, and their vehicle immediately crashes.
Older drivers are commonly involved in collisions at junctions, often because they mis-judge the speed/distance of other vehicles or fail to see a hazard. Visual impairment may be a factor in this type of crash.
Due to their more fragile health and physical condition, older drivers are more likely to suffer injuries when they crash.
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