Should older drivers be tested?
I accept that in some cases, people lose their abilities as they grow older. However, if we are going down the retesting route, might I suggest we start with the cretin (a younger driver) who, upon deciding to change lanes without looking, nearly ran me off the road last Friday? He didn’t see a fucking great R1200RT sitting next to him at the traffic lights – although he did hear the horn blasting in his right ear.
There are plenty of older drivers who are perfectly competent and plenty of younger ones who are not. Any ongoing appraisal of driving skills should apply across the board – so those who are signing the petition can go fuck themselves, frankly. Petitions are for the weak of mind anyway, so are best ignored.
I have to say that it was a 19 year old, overtaking a queue of cars whilst texting, who on seeing an oncoming vehicle swerved in front of a car and into me whilst I was riding slowly in a group of 4 that caused my haddicapped status I now suffer. I was very fortunate to survive, let alone with out being a completely paralized vegtable. In the many miles I have driven as a proffessional driver, I only ever witnessed one blatantly stupid and reckless manouever by an older driver, however I have seen plenty by young, arrogant men and women who seem to think they either know it all or have some devine right that puts them above all others. I am awaiting my handicap permis and then will have to be monitored by a school insructor before I’m back on the road in 4 wheels, but as the controls have been modified I can understand the reasoning behind that. As you say, it’s not older drivers that are the a*seholes.
Did you not get the memo, one size fits all doncha know, experience counts for nothing now, if our young idiot sees something developing quicker it doesn’t mean he’ll do anything about it.
Most older drivers of all classes of vehicles had to learn to control their vehicles properly to keep them shiny side up, those old vehicles wouldn’t forgive idiocy so skills were learned pdq, how much skill does it take to drive a modern car fast in comparison, difference being when the young driver who hasn’t learned that seat of the pants feel for what’s happening at the wheels finally twigs the limits of adhesion have been reached the forces might well be too high even for the car’s electronics to work their miracles.
Clearly not… 🙁
Given they are changing some of the manoeuvres to ‘listening to the satnav’ in the new test, I fear this will only get worse… 🙁
Given that some drivers have ended up in rivers, railway lines and the wrong lane of a motorway, maybe it’s overdue…
Darwin IS evolving to take in newer technology, apparently.
Test the pedestrians who wander into the road engrossed in their smartphones first!
I’ve often thought that having to do a few hours of refresher lessons maybe every ten years or so wouldn’t be a bad idea. Retesting would not be necessary except in exceptional circumstances when the driver in question was obviously totally unsafe. It surprises me how many drivers have forgotten how to position their vehicle when turning right, nearly all of them it sometimes seems. They must have known how to do it on test day surely.
Ongoing refreshers are no bad thing. It all depends on how much driving one is doing and how people keep themselves up to date.
When young, I once saw a car –driven by an old man with at least two elderly passengers in his vehicle — completely misjudged a parked car and crash into the side of it. As he kept driving (perhaps he was deaf as were his passengers so no one heard the bang) I followed, got the old guy’s number and reported it to the damaged car owner. I was later interviewed by a cop who told me that the driver was indeed very old and really shouldn’t have been driving.
But that was then and this is now. As I am older (and eager to avoid crashing into any parked cars) I have to say all the idiocy i see on the road is inevitably a younger person driving. They throw the cars round as if they are likely to be spotted by one of the many thousands of formula one scouts who they are sure stand around on street corners and thus get offered a seat in a faster car on a race circuit.
Someone said that the reason car insurance doesn’t start to adjust until a person is 25 is that people younger than that tend to have difficulty judging speed and distances. Apparently, the brain develops that skill later rather than earlier. If true, you wonder why kids as young as 17 with the IQ of a small potato are allowed to drive at all.
Oh wait, could it be the insurance companies make a ton from kids insurance?
Or, more likely, they “learn” to drive on Grand Theft Auto (GTA) games and once they have to go through the boring “drive like Grandma” driving test, revert to the GTA style of driving. There is, clearly no consequence to getting it wrong in a computer simulation and this is likely to contribute to them ignoring changed road conditions (wet, frosted, ice) etc.
While agreeing in principle, we do [cough]. Start to lose some faculties as we go on.
A cousin learned all her skills driving lorries during the war. She kept driving into her nineties by which time she didn’t know where she was going. Fortunately her equally ancient husband was an excellent navigator.
I believe this campaign started as a result of an older driver continuing to press the accelerator rather than the brake pedal on his automatic transmission car. Obviously he knew the difference otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to start the car, let alone drive it.
That suggests that he could well have passed a driving test.
How anyone of us will react in an ’emergency’ situation is unknowm, we try and interpret what our senses tell us and we don’t always get it right. It can take quite a while sometimes to catch up with reality.
There was a train driver on Shap fell who ‘correctly’ acknowledged two adverse signals as he passed them going backwards! It wasn’t until he saw a third signal displaying a ‘green’ heading away from him that he realised what was going on, by which time he was doing 50 mph plus the wrong way.
How would anyone ‘test’ for that? I bet no-one thought it could ever happen either.
Yes, again, it is a campaign being driven by a grieving relative. Precisely the type of campaign that should be studiously ignored, for it is driven by emotion and not fact.
The statistics are remorseless – as are the insurance companies.
As far as this goes – broadly the arbiters of whether a refresher is required should be left to the actuaries – they can see the risks and act accordingly.
While it is distressing to lose friends + family and suffer personal injury/disability in RTAs – applying collective punishment to an easily identifiable social group because a percentage ( far, far less than young drivers in this case) of them are at fault in some RTAs is simply bollox when other causal factors are much more significant.
There *is* a time to stop driving – and it’s a tough decision especially if it has to be imposed… – that said – the indulgence of “campaigners” in this matter should be challenged with the cold, hard facts of life.
Predictably it seems the bansturbator contingent at the BBC are on this particular bandwagon – given their repeated cognitive failings, memory loss and occasional disorientation – I’d say they should be tested for competence.
I just think that aggressive twattery behind the wheel, jaywalking and cycling with earbuds should also attract some inconvenience toi the perpetrators – but then …. I’m an old git.
The cretins who get behind this type of campaign and sign the puerile petition have no place for facts and evidence. Their emotions are sufficient.
The credence given to most “petitions” has -it would seem – dropped even further than I thought possible. I suppose they’ve always been the province of intolerant meddlesome busybodies but the antics of 38 degrees + chums has diluted it all to near homeopathic levels…
In the case of young drivers in my experience – very few of them are prepared to countenance that their driving is dangerous or bluidy irritating to other road users – I do think that 30+ years of progressive-ism in the UK education system has got more than a bit to do with it.
And what of those people who live overseas? Are they supposed to travel to UK, with all the expense involved, to re-take tests?
“they “learn” to drive on Grand Theft Auto (GTA) games and once they have to go through the boring “drive like Grandma” driving test, revert to the GTA style of driving. There is, clearly no consequence to getting it wrong in a computer simulation”
The SmokeFreeFilms people spend millions(tens of millions? I haven’t been able to find their budget in my searches) on campaigns to censor the dreadful sight of someone smoking a cigarette (or even displaying an ashtray on a table!) in a show/film that some poor 20 year old children might see and then take up smoking as a result. Yet media and games are FULL of reckless wild driving with no consequences.
How about a movement to ban car chases (and drivers looking at their side-seat passengers while driving) from TV and films? Just think of the millions of children’s lives that would be saved, eh?
– MJM, Cyclist Forever… (but not *really* advocating film censorship for these things.)
Are you guys allowed to discriminate on age over there? If so, how much latitude does the government allow you? Could you see if females or males are worse drivers, and then test extra whichever one it was? What about ethnic groups? Is there one which has a much higher per capita accident rate? Do lesbians have a lower accident rate than straight women?
Or is it just old people who can get kicked in the can like this?
Accident statistics tend to suggest the highest risk is young males. Consequently, their insurance premiums tended to be higher. A few years ago the insurance companies were told they couldn’t discriminate on the basis of sex, so female premiums rose.