Elderly drivers should be tested

[HeidiHoNeighbour]

91 year old killed a 3 year old in Edinburgh.
She’s been arrested.

Where I live (NW London) lots of elderly drivers are scarier than the teens racing.

A woman was killed in Sainsbury’s car park near me and the 80ish year old was upset he’d be late!

I think everyone should be retested every ten years.

A friend reported their mum to the DVLA and thought her driving was too dangerous because her age... GP signed the mum off as fit to drive 🙄

*not particularly young these days.

Once I reach 75 I plan to stop driving. A way off yet though!

Their eye sight at 70+ surely can’t be as good as when they were 25?

Not quite 70 yet but mine’s better! My cataract surgery gave me 20/20 vision which will remain the same for the rest of my life. And there are these things you can get now called glasses.

@VinylDetective ohhh glasses that control the speed of your reaction on the roads too? Silly me I must of got a bit muddled.

I’m sorry to ruffle feathers the argument against young and elderly drivers have different issues and since the thread was talking about elderly I gave me view on it.

Someone near me was sitting in a Costa cafe and was killed by an 87 year old ploughing their car into the cafe. www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-39372458

My*

@unmarkedbythat

Everyone should be retested periodically. The huge opposition to this makes me think most people know they would fail the retests, which is even more reason to have them.

I suspect it's more to do with the fact that all ridiculously draconian measures, it's something that would impose a huge burden on the vast majority of people who aren't part of the problem.

I passed my test first go - but what about all those who struggled and had to have 3 or 4 (or more) goes - will they have to have another 3/4 goes every 5/10 years?

A couple of other points - we have a driving test - it doesn't seem to stop twatty aggressive and dangerous driving - so why would a lot of re-tests?

Also how will enforcement work, exactly? We have almost zero Police around here and I see illegal driving and illegal vehicles every single day - how are you planning to enforce this, exactly?

PS. I'm sure it was nothing to do with his age and that he'd constantly been ploughing into cafes throughout his lifetime of driving.

@Julmust

PS. I'm sure it was nothing to do with his age and that he'd constantly been ploughing into cafes throughout his lifetime of driving.

Best post so far

ohhh glasses that control the speed of your reaction on the roads too? Silly me I must of got a bit muddled

I think you did indeed get muddled. We were talking about eyesight.

I cannot understand why the relatives and friends of elderly drivers who are no longer safe on the road don't actually do something about it (ie report to police/DVLA). Are they all happy to let their relatives risk killing someone? They'd prefer to avoid discomfort even at the expense of someone else's life?

An elderly woman accidentally reversed through a convenience store window near me. Caused thousands of pounds worth of damage and was a miracle no one was killed.

YANBU.

Not sure if this has been mentioned but there are already on board devices available that assess driving ability. I wouldn't mind having one of those as I got older.

Just in response to everyone saying "report to the DVLA", both I and my mum's GP reported her when she developed early onset dementia. She kept driving (I couldn't find her car keys to take them off her). We assumed the DVLA had done nothing. After she died I found the letter from them cancelling her license. She'd ignored it, carried on driving with no license, insurance or MOT. The police needed to actually catch her in the process of driving to be able to sieze her car. In some cases it can be very difficult to force someone to stop driving.

Completely agree. Just before lockdown an 80 year old driver ran us off the road at a roundabout. If my DH hasn't noticed and swerved up onto the nearby path he would've gone into us, right where my then 2 year old was sat. I was beyond angry. He didn't stop, despite numerous attempts by us to attract his attention. We followed him to a nearby pub so we could get his details. He couldn't even get out of his car without using this stick device to attach to his door to pull him up. He had been in the wrong lane, he insisted he was in the right lane as if he'd stayed left the traffic from the left would've thought he was turning left and not going straight on. DH uses this same roundabout to and from work every day and there is no way the traffic coming from the left would've thought he was turning left unless he had his indicator on.
We reported him to the police who went to see him. They took no action but warned him about the Highway Code and said his reg has now been flagged.
I know we shouldn't have followed him but to be honest if it makes him think twice about doing it again it was worth it.

I think it's not a bad idea for all drivers to be retested every 10 years.

My dad made the decision to stop driving when he was in his 70s. He had been driving since the age of 14 (not in the UK) and he was genuinely the best driver I've ever known. But at a certain point he came to the conclusion that his reactions and ability to judge distances were not as sharp as they had been. He was fortunate enough to live in a city with excellent public transportation and plentiful taxis. I can imagine how limiting it would be for people in an area without those services to give up driving.

As I said - we're going to need some serious shake up of enforcement for this to work -

"AN ELDERLY man with dementia drove 30 miles up the motorway in the wrong direction without any police intervention leading to the death of himself and a 27-year-old man – only two months after Nottinghamshire police failed to notice that the elderly man’s licence was revoked."

www.loughboroughecho.net/news/local-news/m1-death-crash-dementia-man-12110438

Not saying this isn't an issue that needs addressing but just saying "test all the oldies" or "retest every ten years" isn't actually a solution when we have cases like the above where known "offenders" aren't being dealt with.

Totally agree OP. I read a blog post once called just tell them. It was about someone elderly who killed a mother and small child I think, because they gor confused and their reaction times were crap. He basically ploughed into pedestrians. Awful.
Eyesight deteriorates quite unnoticeably even in young people (myself included, at aged 23 I got a shock going for an eye test). Eye tests are not manditory and the self cert for older people is just a tick box. Retesting everyone about every seven years would create jobs, yield money for government and make roads safer. I would also combine it with a short medical (diabetes check, heart check).

@JoanofLarks

Totally agree OP. I read a blog post once called just tell them. It was about someone elderly who killed a mother and small child I think, because they gor confused and their reaction times were crap. He basically ploughed into pedestrians. Awful. Eyesight deteriorates quite unnoticeably even in young people (myself included, at aged 23 I got a shock going for an eye test). Eye tests are not manditory and the self cert for older people is just a tick box. Retesting everyone about every seven years would create jobs, yield money for government and make roads safer. I would also combine it with a short medical (diabetes check, heart check).

How many goes will you allow? What happens in the meantime if people fail? How will you check people aren't driving illegally and prevent them?

Hitting the accelerator instead of the brake seems to be a common occurrence with these elderly drivers.

The trouble with my dad is, while he’s turned into a shit driver, he’s perfectly fit to drive. There would be no medical reason that he couldn’t drive so reporting him would do no good.

The instructors on the course were emphatic that there's never an excuse for not knowing the speed limit

I disagree, sometimes it's not clear at all, and also limits are changed and signs deliberately not changed in the hope of catching people (it happened near me and after a bit of a local outcry they put signs up saying the limit had changed).

The regulations around the placement of speed limit signs are pretty thorough. At the end of the day it's your job as a driver to be aware of the situation and process the information provided. If you do that correctly (as demonstrated on the SAC) then you won't be caught out.

But feel free to challenge a speeding ticket with "I didn't know what the speed limit was" if you feel hard done by.

Until we figure out what to do about all the cocksure young drivers that think they know it all because they’ve been driving for six months, we can only control the drivers we can do something about.

Elderly drivers are not going to get any better. If they’re already at the point when their ability is being questioned something has to be done.

I nearly hit an old lady the other day who pulled straight out into moving traffic. I saw her waiting at the junction and then just as I was nearly passing she pulled out in front of me. How the hell I didn’t hit her I don’t know, I practically stood on the brakes. I could barely see her over the seat and she trundled along at about twenty five miles per hour on a 40mph limit road. She had a tiny little car and I was in my Landrover. If I’d hit her I’d have probably hurt her. No reaction from her whatsoever.

An elderly driver accidentally drove his lovely new Volvo into the boating lake near us last week. Hit the wrong pedal. Failed an eyesight test on the spot and had his licence revoked. Wrote his car off but luckily didn’t hurt anyone.

@Wankpuffin that's the same with FIL. In fact he said he was going to stop as he didn't feel confident anymore. Then MIL had a stroke and now can't cope with buses. Reporting concerns to DVLA did no good and you can't take the keys off him if you don't know where he has hidden them.