A good start, but I think it should be more than just an eye test.
Here’s my opinion: everyone should have to take a refresher course and test every ten years, dropping to 5 years at 60.
How are you going to recruit new examiners? (there is currently a shortage)
Paying a living wage would be a good start
A quick Google suggests the salary is around £30,000, which would put it above the living wage. It’s not an amazing salary, but let’s say that got bumped to £40,000 and then you’d need to hire probably at least 10x the number of examiners to be able to cope with the demand, then suddenly that gets very expensive.
There’d be arguments about whether it’s actually financially worth it and whether there’s even though labour supply to achieve the number of examiners required.
Cars are expensive by their nature. Pass the costs onto the drivers.
So, you want to discourage people from taking tests, which will result in: fewer people driving and, of those who do drive, more of them driving without a license? How do you plan on replacing the transport for those people who decide they aren’t going to drive - will that be improving public transport? How would that happen?
which will result in: fewer people driving
Yes, don’t need to read any further.
Making it harder for poorer working people to get to work. This would be yet another cost that people have to face. Those that can’t afford to re-take it but need their car to get to work would end up criminalised.
People have to pay for their tests, so the cost would come out of that. Less than +25% fee presumably given that the other costs like the car won’t be changing to pay them more.
We can use all the European examiners that are highly qualified… Oh wait 😦.
🙃
While I agree, the logistics involved in that are significant.
The sliding scale is a good idea. If all they’re doing is eyes, over 80 probably should have it annually. Stuff happens quickly.
A physical test, too
This is something I have suggested around my circles for a long time. But to keep it away from “age-discrimination” I’d be happy to have a re-test every 5 years when your license expires. Alternating between retaking the written test and practical test. So driving test every 10.
Make it compulsory for EVERY driver annually and enforce it through insurance companies levying an additional tax on a policy for failure to supply an eye test certificate when renewing.
There have been various incidents where drivers with defective eye sight who were well under 70. The death of Eilidh Cairns being a prominent one where the police failed to do anything about the driver after he killed her on her bike and he later killed a 98 year old holocaust survivor while she was on a zebra crossing
My most favorite story about eyesight:
I went to the BMV here to get my license renewed. I am in line about 3-4 people back and an old man, presuming like 75-80 is at the counter. Lady is effectively yelling at the dude he is so hard of hearing, “put your face against the visor, you will see a light blink to the left or the right, just tell me which side you see the blinking light”. A regular peripheral vision test.
Man puts his face against the visor, and stands there. Lady asks “do you see a light?”. Man responds “What light??”. This goes back and forth about 5 to 6 times. Eventually the lady just says “THERE IS A LIGHT ON THE LEFT DO YOU SEE IT?”. The Dude fully pivots his entire body to look left within the visor, “oh yea I see a little light”. She asks for a signature and he goes to get his picture taken.
Man in front of me turns around, he and I just look at each other in disbelief that he just legally got permission to drive a car. He cannot hear anything, and can barely see anything, in a car on the road.
Doesn’t sound stupid, but it’s important to remember that old drivers are vastly safer than young drivers. If you can do something small like eye tests (which a lot of old people need and ought to be having anyway) then that’s sensible, but if you want to improve road safety it’s not the place to look.
Old drivers stick in people’s minds for some reason - maybe because they’ve been stuck behind them at 30mph on a national speed limit road for a few minutes - but the more regular dangerous occurrences slip by. The most common bit of dangerous driving I see is tailgating which is absolutely ubiquitous, followed by distraction leading to weaving - which I assume to be phone usage. Neither is the domain of the elderly.
Live in Dorset which is gods waiting room and this is spot on, people driving supremely slowly are usually old but annoying, people driving supremely slowly whilst in their phones, middle lane hoggers, idiots up your arse are the actually dangerous drivers.
I’ve never seen a middle-lane hogger responsible for anything dangerous either - I’d put them firmly in the “annoying” category. Once in a while you see someone responding dangerously to someone driving in an annoying but otherwise basically safe way, and I also see this when the “annoying” way people are driving is driving at the speed limit, or waiting for a safe gap to pull into after overtaking, so I don’t feel like that can really be blamed on people hogging the middle lane.
They force people into the outside lane and are defacto not paying attetion to anyone else, its driving without due care at least imo, they also are invariably causing a concertina behind them
Sounds annoying to me, rather than dangerous - just like driving unnecessarily slowly.
I dunno… I’ve seen some absolutely shit bags that looked over 60 driving around. Failing to stop at pedestrian crossings, running lights, merging without indicating, turning into roads whilst a pedestrian is crossing half way. Basically everything that would get you a major on your test.
I don’t think age grants you better driving capability. And the lack of visual capacity probably makes you worse.
The accident statistics (I can help find them if you want) are that accident risk goes down steadily until (IIRC) mid 60s, and only increases above the risk of 20-30 year olds at a very advanced age in your 80s.
There are two things going on:
- Young people, especially young men are on average significantly more reckless than older people. This is a direct way in which age “grants you better driving capability” - you just become less of an idiot.
- Young people on average have less driving experience than older people. That’s not a direct result of age but it does correlate.
These are different processes but they can both be targeted for safety measures.
Just plonking this here for ease of conversation.
Looks pretty obvious to me that something needs done about old folk’s driving.
Also a nice dose of survivorship bias! All those old people survived the gauntlet of driving for decades (even in much less safe vehicles) without losing life or license, so safer drivers are more represented.
Old people drive less as well
But the statistics are per (billion) miles traveled, not per person.
Young drivers make more claims primarily out of lack of experience in driving. It’s an issue that automatically resolves itself over time.
The same is not true for the elderly.
Boy racers don’t “automatically resolve themselves” through gaining experience. Without intervention you have to rely on reckless drivers gaining maturity, which is far from guaranteed, or having an accident that kills them or scares some sense into them, neither of which is desirable. The interventions currently are things like police catching them, which again is not desirable if an intervention earlier could prevent it escalating to the point where police have to get involved.
But my point is really that there are options to improve safety of younger drivers. If you want to reduce road deaths by 100, shouldn’t you target the group that is causing the most accidents, and the most severe ones too?
Morbidly you could just as well argue that the elderly are going to die soon anyway so the issue “automatically resolves itself” in the majority of cases too.
