State of Cape Cod

Retest If You Must, But Be Fair About It

There was a report on the news the other night about a traffic accident. Someone had struck a child, who subsequently passed away. The driver was a man of about eighty. The reporter, in an account that couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, perhaps a minute and a half, mentioned the word elderly and/or the driver’s age no less than six times, including the very first sentence. That’s once every ten to fifteen seconds.

In the Cape Cod Times of August 5 there was an account of a traffic accident in which a gentleman drove his car into the harbor. The first two words in the headline were ‘elderly driver’. His age was also noted in the brief account. The cause of the mishap? He spilled an ice cream float in his lap. As if age had a bearing on it and no younger person has ever done something similar, or worse.

The same issue of the Times presented an account of a traffic accident in which three people were hospitalized. Nowhere in the story was the age of any of the victims mentioned. Presumably, they weren’t “elderly”. Fair and unbiased? Hardly.

There’s a big disconnect here. If the driver’s age is relevant to one incident involving motor vehicles, then it should be pertinent to all such accounts. If one didn’t know that news reporters, who arrogantly  refer to themselves as journalists, were fair and unbiased, one might suppose that they were engaged in a campaign against drivers of a certain age.

In Massachusetts, from publicity hungry legislators on down to the wannabe journalists (many, if not most, apparently just rewrite wire service stories) and television news readers (really just actors who recite from the teleprompter), there is a continuing effort underway to legislate the retesting of older Americans starting anywhere between ages 65 to 85.

All of which embraces and disseminates the misconception that elderly drivers cause more accidents than any other age group. This is simply not true, and the news media should be, and probably is, aware of it, as this study from Pennsylvania clearly shows. As for our own state, the statistics verify what other states already know, that fewer accidents are caused by elderly drivers than other age group. But those who interpret this fact deliberately skew the findings.

They base their argument by admitting that, while older motorists have fewer accidents, as verified by the U. S. Government Accountability Office, it’s only because they drive less. But, they add, elderly drivers have more accidents per mile driven. So what? It really doesn’t matter to the victim whether he was killed  by someone of an age which has fewer mishaps per mile, than one who has fewer mishaps, period. In fact, no matter how you present it, the odds of getting killed by an eighty year old are far less than of being done in by a twenty year old. Check the section of this article entitled Looking At the Research to find the truth. 

One of my favorite sleight of hand locutions is that elderly motorists cause accidents because they drive too slowly. This, the younger, more aggressive drivers try to convince themselves, makes it necessary to pass them illegally, causing accidents. Evidently they never heard of personal responsibility.  If some fool passes unsafely or illegally for whatever reason, and has an accident, then it’s his fault, not that of the law abiding slower driver he passed. The speed limit is the maximum, not the minimum.

If driving too slowly is the best argument the selfish “Get the Q-Tips Off the Road” crowd can come up with, then refuting it is a cinch. Take the hot topic of the day: what age group engages in the idiotic practice of texting while behind the wheel? While that by itself is enough to make the case for our side, there are many others.

Older people tend to know their limitations and are self regulating for that reason. Many don’t drive at night, let alone in the wee small hours. A lot of them avoid left turns when possible. As a rule, they don’t tailgate. Few drive while intoxicated. You won’t find many oldsters laying down rubber from a red light, or making donuts.

Who do you suppose is more likely to provoke a road rage incident? Not many octogenarians are suicidal enough to flip off a car full of teens. Neither are they likely to be caught with open containers of adult beverages in the vehicle, nor under the influence of controlled substances.

This is not to say that all accidents are the fault of younger people, nor that elderly drivers are paragons of motoring virtue. The truth is that accidents happen to all drivers, with greater or lesser severity, regardless of age. Retesting is not a bad idea, but it ought not be determined by age. A bill that would give doctors more freedom to report people with impairments to the state’s licensing authorities is in the works, and appears to have merit. The bill, as shown under A Call for Stricter Rules, expands on medical-reporting rules already in place in many states, including Massachusetts, and is sponsored by, among others, Safe Roads Now and the AARP. It makes more sense and is cheaper and more extensive than simply testing all the old guys every few years.