26 ms·

“Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.”” I was driving in Oakland w

“Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.”” I was driving in Oakland when the car in front of me didn’t slow down for a pedestrian in the crosswalk. The pedestrian disappeared in front of the car. I stopped my car, got out, found the struck young woman trembling and bleeding in the street. The speed limit was 30 miles per hour. I don’t think the driver was going quite that fast — maybe 20, 25 at most. The woman driving the car was elderly. It’s tough to gauge her age — pushing late 70s, maybe 80? She said she didn’t notice the girl in the crosswalk. I was upset. I stayed the entire time, talked with the cops at length, gave a statement. I wanted to see the lady’s license taken away. Or a ticket at least. Or heck, even a talking to about if maybe she’s no longer fit to drive. The cops let the old lady drive away. No ticket. No talk. I was stunned. Surely if you hit someone with your car at that speed, in fucking crosswalk, you at the very least need to prove to the DMV that you’re safe to drive. Especially if you’re an elderly person. But nope. They said they had no grounds with which to take any action at all. Still bothers me. I hope that lady hasn’t killed anyone.

unwrap 7y ago
It's not always the drivers' fault, some pedestrians are just asking to be put in a coffin. Where I live, most people jump on the road, jack-in-the-box-style. They don't wait for the cars to stop, they don't even bother to look around. They walk slowly, sometimes crossing the road at an angle (which takes a lot more time, obviously), even if it's a single physically fit individual blocking a busy 4-lane road. I'd say about 80-90% of pedestrians behave this way. So, despite it not being a particularly big city, running over pedestrians is a daily occurrence. I am a pedestrian myself, mind you. I don't even have a driver's license. Is the situation better in the US?
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Based off your parent poster's description of the situation, it sounds as if the pedestrian had the right of way. However, if the driver was half their age, all else equal, would we say the DMV should assess if they're competent to drive? The primary cause of the accident could be independent of age.
  - unwrap 7y ago
    For a pedestrian it doesn't matter whether you have "right of way", because you can be right a hundred times over and still go to a mortician. That's all I am trying to say. If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby. Cars are multiple-ton steel monsters, it takes a lot of energy and space to slow them down. Just bringing some perspective from a country with a lot of idiots (that's what they are -- idiots) needlessly risking their lives.
    - spaceribs 7y ago
      You've used the word "Idiots" a lot to describe people who walk into the street, but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle. You want to take out your air-conditioned garbage-spewing box out to race across the city without a single care for anyone else using the streets? Well I think you're an idiot for advocating towards that selfish goal.
      - afiori 7y ago
        If I understood correctly in this comment unwrap was simply stating that if the street are factually dangerous you should treat them as dangerous. unwrap was not defending drivers that kill people. > but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle. I mostly opt for having rules on the pedestrian side. But each person should be careful about their own life and constantly be aware of the current risk.
    - drdeadringer 7y ago
      > If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby. Recently I've had to take some "defensive pedestrian" tactics and strategies at certain crosswalks at certain corners at certain times of day. It's a little more than the usual common sense for when walking around in an urban environment, but it's helped.
- piyush_soni 7y ago
  Yes, it's a little bit better in US than in some other countries. On the whole (especially in smaller cities where people have 'time'), people generally stop cars for pedestrians, slow down near intersections and zebra-crossings etc. (Can't say the same about bigger cities like Boston/Chicago etc. however)
- chronolitus 7y ago
  Let me float you a hypothetical situation: you're in command of a few tons of steel, and your priority is to get to some arbitrary location. Your second priority, I assume, is to not murder anyone. Here's what you know about the environment : it is populated with (harmless fleshly) people who are also going about fulfilling goals 1 and 2. You know with high probability that at any given moment one might quickly cross the path of your vehicle - it is normal (80-90% of people do it) to behave this way. You can: - reduce your speed, knowing that accidental collisions are likely. This slightly penalizes your first goal, but greatly increases the outlook for the second. - Blame 80-90% of everyone, for not taking the cost onto themselves to ensure you can get to your goal quickly without much effort. I guess it also boils down to your views on responsibility: "I shouldn't be accountable when the risky situations which i knowingly entered materialize into accidents. Especially because these risks mostly apply to others." or "I am personally directing a large amount of kinetic energy for convenience reasons and am responsible of where it ends up. the onus of carefulness befalls me and not the other unwilling participants as they are handling much less kinetic energy and therefore by themselves orders of magnitude less likely to cause the death or injury of others."
  - unwrap 7y ago
    I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything. I think you'd see it in a very different light if you were living here. I am honestly very worried for my friends and relatives who drive, most of whom do it very, very carefully, and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children. BTW, didn't I say I don't have a driver's license?
    - chronolitus 7y ago
      > I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything. I understand how you feel. However if you are right and I am wrong - then your words are not wasted, even if they are not well received, as long as they are read. > and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children I guess our road safety practices and status-quo should not bother to extend as far as guaranteeing the well-being of the feeble-minded. Children playing in the street are fair-game. To be fair, I understand that your viewpoint is economically efficient, to an extent. I can accept that favoring cars has significant economic benefits, and I understand why society has done it at the expense of quality-of-life at the ground level (children shouldn't play in the street, the area around your appartment/house is not for you to enjoy but for commuting strangers, etc), and personal safety. But is it really necessary to hold on to this so dearly and for so long? Especially when other cities/countries have shown that alternatives are possible and attractive?
ChuckNorris89 7y ago
Wait, what!? In Europe if you strike a pedestrian on the crosswalk you'll definitely loose your license and be looking at manslaughter charges too while your insurance company will murder you after paying the victim's medical/disability/court bills.
- lukeqsee 7y ago
  In Europe, if you strike a pedestrian outside a crosswalk, the same might happen to you depending on the jurisdiction. Pedestrians create their own right of way, practically speaking (if not judicially). :-)
  - p_l 7y ago
    Depends on country, but even then I think "limited trust" is the approach expected from drivers.
  - ElKrist 7y ago
    A relative in France hit a pedestrian outside of a crosswalk, the aged man died after a few days at the hospital. It was night time, rainy and the victim popped out from the space between two parked cars and ran just in front of the motorbike to quickly cross the road. There was automatically a trial anyway for manslaughter and my relative was not found guilty of anything. I think it's a good thing to automatically have a trial anyway. The rule here is "the driver must be in full control of its vehicle at anytime". It basically means that if you could have physically avoided a pedestrian (factoring in response and braking times..), you'll be found guilty even if the pedestrian was outside of a crosswalk for instance.
    - gavia1 7y ago
      What do you mean by "full control"? The average driver does not have the experience nor the training to maintain full control at all times. For example, consider a situation where the driver has to correct understeer, or lift-off oversteer, both relatively easy to achieve in cold, wet conditions.
wycy 7y ago
It seems like absolute common sense that as abilities degrade as you age you should have to retest for drivers licenses periodically. Perhaps with greatly increasing periodicity with increasing age. However, any politician who proposed or approved such an idea would be immediately voted out of office, because old people are very reliable voters. So it's not going to happen.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  There's no way to pass such a law without it seeming agist - because it would be. It seems to me, probably naively, that the easiest way around this would be to require yearly tests for everyone. You're driving a huge honking piece of metal at 60+ miles an hour down the street; a yearly verification of your ability to do so doesn't seem excessive.
  - bspammer 7y ago
    Cognitive decline happens to everyone the longer they live, if that's ageism then I'm afraid it's also reality. Testing everyone yearly would be prohibitively expensive. Hopefully, self-driving cars will eventually render these discussions redundant. But that still seems to be decades away at this rate.
    - pavel_lishin 7y ago
      > Testing everyone yearly would be prohibitively expensive. I reiterate that we're driving huge pieces of metal at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Let's stop sacrificing people's lives for the privilege, and start sacrificing time and money.
      - cgriswald 7y ago
        I propose greater enforcement of existing traffic laws (instead of just speed and DUI); and a heavier hand when it comes to revocation. This would target those who need to be retested the most regardless of age and the burden of doing so can be put on them through fees.
rtrr_eter 7y ago
Here in India, we hardly see crosswalks ( at least me ), so problem solved.
Spooky23 7y ago
It's an impossible case to prosecute, as the woman had no bad intent, probably had a clean record, and the only evidence is eyewitness testimony. Eyewitnesses suck at trial, and defending the elderly is pretty easy.
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
  There is a wide berth between prosecution and no pentalty whatsoever. For example, In many states, you can lose a license without being prosecuted. Indiana is one of them. Alternatively, a prudent measure would be to require the driver to get a medical clearance to drive again. This, in my opinion, would be the wise choice.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    That's another issue, as now you'll have police applying selective judgement, mostly in urban areas that impact people's ability to work. Headline will be "Police target minority driver licenses for minor traffic infractions."
anotherthro313 7y ago
Americans pretty much only care about themselves. It's evident if you watch the way they drive and road rage. The insanity, super fat people in cars driving 1/2 a mile to McDonalds, screaming at everybody along the way who happens to "get in their way", never understanding that "they aren't stuck in travel, they are travel".
stronglikedan 7y ago
As a pedestrian (or cyclist), you should always give way to cars, even being prepared to jump out of the way when you have the right-of-way. Unless the driver is intoxicated, they get inconvenienced with higher insurance premiums for a little while at worst, while you get stuck with life long injuries and pain at worst.
- myspy 7y ago
  Which is a reason why cars have to vanish from cities.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Then cities have to radically change. I don't know how people can ever commute from the current urban sprawl to their place of work without them. Cities would need to build massive bus and rail infrastructures at the cost of billions or similar amounts are going to have to be spent to increase densification. I chose where to live because of a desire to be able to commute easily - the bus is 10 minutes, walking is about 25 - but I paid for it, both literally and figuratively.
    - freen 7y ago
      They can, and they have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        I believe you're looking at a city that was historically traveled via footpath - try and apply that to a modern American city.
    - magduf 7y ago
      Simple: they need to bulldoze most everything and start over, building cities the way they are in Europe with high density and public transit lines built in (and under). Add in either closed roads for anything except delivery trucks (you can't deliver goods to the supermarket with a subway), or huge tolls/taxes for personal vehicles to keep people from driving there and causing gridlock and get them out of the suburbs. But in addition you need to have lots of construction of residential units (in high-rises) so that housing costs stay affordable.
at-fates-hands 7y ago
First time I visited my cousin in Illinois, they took me into Chicago for dinner at a pizza place and then to show me the rest of the city. During dinner, my cousin told me not to slow walk when you cross the street. As soon as the light changes, cars will barrel right into the intersection, so be careful. Sure enough, I went to cross and my cousin tried to grab my arm and not let me cross. The light was green, but the timer on the crosswalk light was going down from 5. I figured I was good to go. The light turned green for the cars and I was just about across the street when two cars who clearly had seen me, raced into the intersection. I had to nearly dive to the curb to get to safety and in the process both drivers shouted at me to get the F out of the street. I turned around petrified and saw my cousin and uncle were laughing hilariously at my introduction to being a pedestrian in Chicago. I'm sure there are still many cities where cars will (wrongly) always have the right of way; regardless of whether there are people in the crosswalk or not and don't care if someone gets clipped or run over in the process.
jliptzin 7y ago
How is it possible that we don't have mandatory driving tests once you reach certain ages, ie 80, 85, 95+? I just heard the other week that my friend's great-great grandma (98 years old) is still driving. If someone that old can still drive safely, good for them, but there should be a mandatory test to check that.
- digitalengineer 7y ago
  Perhaps because the generation making the laws are baby boomers? (And don’t want to loose their access to their cars?) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/17/generation-sociopaths-review-trump-baby-boomers-ruined-world https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/17/generation-soc...
  - cafard 7y ago
    My late mother-in-law's neighbor drove until something over 90, which pretty much nobody thought was a great idea. I don't think the boomers of Pennsylvania did anything to enable this except leave the laws unchanged.
- jmull 7y ago
  Here's some data to inform: https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/ https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri... From this, 60s is peak age range for driving safety. In the 70s people are still good. 80+ are still pretty good in the "All crashes" and "Injury crashes" categories (a little better than people 25-29, a little worse than people 30-39), but they are really bad in "Fatal crashes" -- even a little worse than 16-17yo. Digging into the fatalities, the spike in deaths caused by old people are themselves and not passengers or others. So I guess the motivation for driving tests for old people would be to protect them from themselves and should apply to people 80+. If we want to protect people from bad drivers generally, we should really want to do something about 16-17yos (just pushing back the driving age might not do it because inexperience is probably a significant factor). Actually something like more monitoring/training/tests for drivers, say, 16-24 would be the best place to start. (Drivers 25-29 are also a problem, but presumably if you improve younger drivers the older age range will take care of itself as the good young drivers age.)

unwrap 7y ago

It's not always the drivers' fault, some pedestrians are just asking to be put in a coffin. Where I live, most people jump on the road, jack-in-the-box-style. They don't wait for the cars to stop, they don't even bother to look around. They walk slowly, sometimes crossing the road at an angle (which takes a lot more time, obviously), even if it's a single physically fit individual blocking a busy 4-lane road. I'd say about 80-90% of pedestrians behave this way. So, despite it not being a particularly big city, running over pedestrians is a daily occurrence. I am a pedestrian myself, mind you. I don't even have a driver's license. Is the situation better in the US?

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Based off your parent poster's description of the situation, it sounds as if the pedestrian had the right of way. However, if the driver was half their age, all else equal, would we say the DMV should assess if they're competent to drive? The primary cause of the accident could be independent of age.
- unwrap 7y ago
  For a pedestrian it doesn't matter whether you have "right of way", because you can be right a hundred times over and still go to a mortician. That's all I am trying to say. If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby. Cars are multiple-ton steel monsters, it takes a lot of energy and space to slow them down. Just bringing some perspective from a country with a lot of idiots (that's what they are -- idiots) needlessly risking their lives.
  - spaceribs 7y ago
    You've used the word "Idiots" a lot to describe people who walk into the street, but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle. You want to take out your air-conditioned garbage-spewing box out to race across the city without a single care for anyone else using the streets? Well I think you're an idiot for advocating towards that selfish goal.
    - afiori 7y ago
      If I understood correctly in this comment unwrap was simply stating that if the street are factually dangerous you should treat them as dangerous. unwrap was not defending drivers that kill people. > but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle. I mostly opt for having rules on the pedestrian side. But each person should be careful about their own life and constantly be aware of the current risk.
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    > If you are crossing the road, please wait for the cars to stop, or make absolutely sure there aren't any nearby. Recently I've had to take some "defensive pedestrian" tactics and strategies at certain crosswalks at certain corners at certain times of day. It's a little more than the usual common sense for when walking around in an urban environment, but it's helped.
piyush_soni 7y ago
Yes, it's a little bit better in US than in some other countries. On the whole (especially in smaller cities where people have 'time'), people generally stop cars for pedestrians, slow down near intersections and zebra-crossings etc. (Can't say the same about bigger cities like Boston/Chicago etc. however)
chronolitus 7y ago
Let me float you a hypothetical situation: you're in command of a few tons of steel, and your priority is to get to some arbitrary location. Your second priority, I assume, is to not murder anyone. Here's what you know about the environment : it is populated with (harmless fleshly) people who are also going about fulfilling goals 1 and 2. You know with high probability that at any given moment one might quickly cross the path of your vehicle - it is normal (80-90% of people do it) to behave this way. You can: - reduce your speed, knowing that accidental collisions are likely. This slightly penalizes your first goal, but greatly increases the outlook for the second. - Blame 80-90% of everyone, for not taking the cost onto themselves to ensure you can get to your goal quickly without much effort. I guess it also boils down to your views on responsibility: "I shouldn't be accountable when the risky situations which i knowingly entered materialize into accidents. Especially because these risks mostly apply to others." or "I am personally directing a large amount of kinetic energy for convenience reasons and am responsible of where it ends up. the onus of carefulness befalls me and not the other unwilling participants as they are handling much less kinetic energy and therefore by themselves orders of magnitude less likely to cause the death or injury of others."
- unwrap 7y ago
  I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything. I think you'd see it in a very different light if you were living here. I am honestly very worried for my friends and relatives who drive, most of whom do it very, very carefully, and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children. BTW, didn't I say I don't have a driver's license?
  - chronolitus 7y ago
    > I see no point in wasting words seeing how differing viewpoints are received here. Somebody has even bothered to go over my comment history and downvote everything. I understand how you feel. However if you are right and I am wrong - then your words are not wasted, even if they are not well received, as long as they are read. > and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children I guess our road safety practices and status-quo should not bother to extend as far as guaranteeing the well-being of the feeble-minded. Children playing in the street are fair-game. To be fair, I understand that your viewpoint is economically efficient, to an extent. I can accept that favoring cars has significant economic benefits, and I understand why society has done it at the expense of quality-of-life at the ground level (children shouldn't play in the street, the area around your appartment/house is not for you to enjoy but for commuting strangers, etc), and personal safety. But is it really necessary to hold on to this so dearly and for so long? Especially when other cities/countries have shown that alternatives are possible and attractive?

ChuckNorris89 7y ago

Wait, what!? In Europe if you strike a pedestrian on the crosswalk you'll definitely loose your license and be looking at manslaughter charges too while your insurance company will murder you after paying the victim's medical/disability/court bills.

lukeqsee 7y ago
In Europe, if you strike a pedestrian outside a crosswalk, the same might happen to you depending on the jurisdiction. Pedestrians create their own right of way, practically speaking (if not judicially). :-)
- p_l 7y ago
  Depends on country, but even then I think "limited trust" is the approach expected from drivers.
- ElKrist 7y ago
  A relative in France hit a pedestrian outside of a crosswalk, the aged man died after a few days at the hospital. It was night time, rainy and the victim popped out from the space between two parked cars and ran just in front of the motorbike to quickly cross the road. There was automatically a trial anyway for manslaughter and my relative was not found guilty of anything. I think it's a good thing to automatically have a trial anyway. The rule here is "the driver must be in full control of its vehicle at anytime". It basically means that if you could have physically avoided a pedestrian (factoring in response and braking times..), you'll be found guilty even if the pedestrian was outside of a crosswalk for instance.
  - gavia1 7y ago
    What do you mean by "full control"? The average driver does not have the experience nor the training to maintain full control at all times. For example, consider a situation where the driver has to correct understeer, or lift-off oversteer, both relatively easy to achieve in cold, wet conditions.

wycy 7y ago

It seems like absolute common sense that as abilities degrade as you age you should have to retest for drivers licenses periodically. Perhaps with greatly increasing periodicity with increasing age. However, any politician who proposed or approved such an idea would be immediately voted out of office, because old people are very reliable voters. So it's not going to happen.

pavel_lishin 7y ago
There's no way to pass such a law without it seeming agist - because it would be. It seems to me, probably naively, that the easiest way around this would be to require yearly tests for everyone. You're driving a huge honking piece of metal at 60+ miles an hour down the street; a yearly verification of your ability to do so doesn't seem excessive.
- bspammer 7y ago
  Cognitive decline happens to everyone the longer they live, if that's ageism then I'm afraid it's also reality. Testing everyone yearly would be prohibitively expensive. Hopefully, self-driving cars will eventually render these discussions redundant. But that still seems to be decades away at this rate.
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    > Testing everyone yearly would be prohibitively expensive. I reiterate that we're driving huge pieces of metal at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Let's stop sacrificing people's lives for the privilege, and start sacrificing time and money.
    - cgriswald 7y ago
      I propose greater enforcement of existing traffic laws (instead of just speed and DUI); and a heavier hand when it comes to revocation. This would target those who need to be retested the most regardless of age and the burden of doing so can be put on them through fees.

rtrr_eter 7y ago

Here in India, we hardly see crosswalks ( at least me ), so problem solved.

Spooky23 7y ago

It's an impossible case to prosecute, as the woman had no bad intent, probably had a clean record, and the only evidence is eyewitness testimony. Eyewitnesses suck at trial, and defending the elderly is pretty easy.

Broken_Hippo 7y ago
There is a wide berth between prosecution and no pentalty whatsoever. For example, In many states, you can lose a license without being prosecuted. Indiana is one of them. Alternatively, a prudent measure would be to require the driver to get a medical clearance to drive again. This, in my opinion, would be the wise choice.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That's another issue, as now you'll have police applying selective judgement, mostly in urban areas that impact people's ability to work. Headline will be "Police target minority driver licenses for minor traffic infractions."

anotherthro313 7y ago

Americans pretty much only care about themselves. It's evident if you watch the way they drive and road rage. The insanity, super fat people in cars driving 1/2 a mile to McDonalds, screaming at everybody along the way who happens to "get in their way", never understanding that "they aren't stuck in travel, they are travel".

stronglikedan 7y ago

As a pedestrian (or cyclist), you should always give way to cars, even being prepared to jump out of the way when you have the right-of-way. Unless the driver is intoxicated, they get inconvenienced with higher insurance premiums for a little while at worst, while you get stuck with life long injuries and pain at worst.

myspy 7y ago
Which is a reason why cars have to vanish from cities.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Then cities have to radically change. I don't know how people can ever commute from the current urban sprawl to their place of work without them. Cities would need to build massive bus and rail infrastructures at the cost of billions or similar amounts are going to have to be spent to increase densification. I chose where to live because of a desire to be able to commute easily - the bus is 10 minutes, walking is about 25 - but I paid for it, both literally and figuratively.
  - freen 7y ago
    They can, and they have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I believe you're looking at a city that was historically traveled via footpath - try and apply that to a modern American city.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Simple: they need to bulldoze most everything and start over, building cities the way they are in Europe with high density and public transit lines built in (and under). Add in either closed roads for anything except delivery trucks (you can't deliver goods to the supermarket with a subway), or huge tolls/taxes for personal vehicles to keep people from driving there and causing gridlock and get them out of the suburbs. But in addition you need to have lots of construction of residential units (in high-rises) so that housing costs stay affordable.

at-fates-hands 7y ago

First time I visited my cousin in Illinois, they took me into Chicago for dinner at a pizza place and then to show me the rest of the city. During dinner, my cousin told me not to slow walk when you cross the street. As soon as the light changes, cars will barrel right into the intersection, so be careful. Sure enough, I went to cross and my cousin tried to grab my arm and not let me cross. The light was green, but the timer on the crosswalk light was going down from 5. I figured I was good to go. The light turned green for the cars and I was just about across the street when two cars who clearly had seen me, raced into the intersection. I had to nearly dive to the curb to get to safety and in the process both drivers shouted at me to get the F out of the street. I turned around petrified and saw my cousin and uncle were laughing hilariously at my introduction to being a pedestrian in Chicago. I'm sure there are still many cities where cars will (wrongly) always have the right of way; regardless of whether there are people in the crosswalk or not and don't care if someone gets clipped or run over in the process.

jliptzin 7y ago

How is it possible that we don't have mandatory driving tests once you reach certain ages, ie 80, 85, 95+? I just heard the other week that my friend's great-great grandma (98 years old) is still driving. If someone that old can still drive safely, good for them, but there should be a mandatory test to check that.

digitalengineer 7y ago
Perhaps because the generation making the laws are baby boomers? (And don’t want to loose their access to their cars?) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/17/generation-sociopaths-review-trump-baby-boomers-ruined-world https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/17/generation-soc...
- cafard 7y ago
  My late mother-in-law's neighbor drove until something over 90, which pretty much nobody thought was a great idea. I don't think the boomers of Pennsylvania did anything to enable this except leave the laws unchanged.
jmull 7y ago
Here's some data to inform: https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/ https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri... From this, 60s is peak age range for driving safety. In the 70s people are still good. 80+ are still pretty good in the "All crashes" and "Injury crashes" categories (a little better than people 25-29, a little worse than people 30-39), but they are really bad in "Fatal crashes" -- even a little worse than 16-17yo. Digging into the fatalities, the spike in deaths caused by old people are themselves and not passengers or others. So I guess the motivation for driving tests for old people would be to protect them from themselves and should apply to people 80+. If we want to protect people from bad drivers generally, we should really want to do something about 16-17yos (just pushing back the driving age might not do it because inexperience is probably a significant factor). Actually something like more monitoring/training/tests for drivers, say, 16-24 would be the best place to start. (Drivers 25-29 are also a problem, but presumably if you improve younger drivers the older age range will take care of itself as the good young drivers age.)