Tangled Metal wrote:Generally older people are involved in fewer accidents than young people apparently. As someone said there's reasons why this is a misleading bit of information relating to the issue of being fit to drive. It doesn't factor in typical driving times (off peak driving safer than peak driving), miles travelled per journey (longer journeys increase risk of accident I believe), etc.
My father stopped driving at once when his GP suggested he needed to consider stopping before much longer. He was a safe driver up to that point, sticking to speed limits and never having had a point on his licence; not long before he'd reacted to someone pulling out directly in front of him on a 60mph road very quickly, and his rapid and well-judged handling of the car was such that nobody was hurt- most drivers would have struggled to have reacted as quickly or as well, and it's more than likely that at least the driver in the other car would have been killed or seriously injured. My mother still drives, with full agreement of her GP and optician, but only drives a few hundred miles a year, and pretty much all in 30mph zones (and carefully and within that limit).
If many elderly people do very few miles, as she does, that will skew the accident stats in their favour, as would your point about when they drive- Mum avoids the rush hours, for example, because she can. OH and I do about 18,000 a year between us and often have to do journeys on busy M-ways at peak times in heavy traffic.
You'd need an 'accidents per mile driven' before comparing different age groups. And you'd also need to take into account the severity of the results of accidents before saying which age group was more dangerous. If the accidents that elderly people get involved with are more often low-speed, they may be less devastating in their effects.
Younger drivers tend to be less experienced, and you can't get round that. You can't stop inexperienced drivers (of any age) from driving unless you want in the long run to have nobody able to drive. That suggests to me there is some argument for restricting what less experienced drivers can do immediately after passing their test.