Agreed. This is a very difficult issue. My parents moved from a city to a village on an island when they retired. They told me that they'd thought it all through. If Dad ever had to give up driving (Mum didn't drive) they'd be fine because everything was in walking distance. What they hadn't thought about, and in my 30s I didn't foresee either, was that walking distance for a 65yo is not walking distance for most over 80s. They both saw a decline in their mobility as they moved into their 80s and became heavily dependent on Dad driving. He was a very good driver, but his eyesight was starting to deteriorate too. Then he had a mini-stroke and automatically lost his licence for six months. His health was failing generally by this time (he was 88/9) and he was becoming very frail. The psychological effect of losing his independence was considerable. They have a very good community around them and lots of people offered lifts, but all spontaneity was gone.
To my horror, he was adamant that he was going to drive again as soon as he got the all clear, and both the GP and the optician said he was fine, so he did. DVLA just rubber stamps the forms. He only drove very locally, but the difference it made to his mood and to my parents' quality of life to have that freedom and independence back was enormous. None of that would have mattered in the slightest if he'd had an accident and someone else had been injured or killed, obviously, but now that we have so many people living into extreme old age we really do have to think as a society how we support them and make it possible for them to retain their independence in a world built for people with cars.
Sadly, his health then took another big downturn and he died last year, so we never had to tackle the issue of when he would give up the car. Way back when he was 65 he'd talked quite nonchalantly about that as something that might happen in the distant future. It was quite different when it came to facing what that would mean in practical terms.