When an 86-year-old California man careened into a crowded farmers market last July, killing 10 people and injuring dozens more, it reignited the debate over whether elderly drivers ought to be held to higher testing standards as a matter of policy.
But high-profile cases such as that tragedy don’t tell the whole story, according to statistics compiled by both national organizations and Washington state’s Traffic Safety Commission.
In fact, not even the raw numbers give an accurate picture of how safe older drivers are on public roadways, said Dick Doane, a research analyst with the commission.
“We’ve known for a long time that elderly drivers have had higher collision rates and especially higher fatality rates,” Doane said.
But a study produced in 2001 by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety showed that age was much less of a factor than was once thought, he said.
“One of the reasons (elderly drivers) end up in the fatal crash categories is they are more fragile, and less likely to survive the trauma of an accident,” Doane said.
Add to that the fact that older drivers move more slowly and take fewer long trips, and the result is a skewed perspective among the public over the abilities for seniors to operate automobiles safely, he said.
If the individuals dying in collisions caused by elderly drivers are mostly the drivers themselves, that’s a tragedy — but it’s also a sign that statistics alone must be treated with caution.
By contrast, young drivers show a much greater risk of causing significant damage, according to both highway safety data and actuarial data collected for the purpose of determining auto insurance premiums.
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The rest of the story appears in the Monday Peninsula Daily News.