In 2025, persons 65 and over will make up 18.5% of the total population. The number of persons aged 85 and over is increasing more rapidly than any other age group. The elderly are taking more trips, driving further, and continuing to drive much later in life. These conditions lead to concerns about traffic safety. Although the elderly are healthier and drive safer cars than they did just two decades ago, their frailty makes them more susceptible to injury than younger persons involved in traffic crashes of the same severity. In addition, visual, physical, and cognitive skills, all of which contribute to driving abilities, decrease with advancing age. While the overall number of highway fatalities has decreased regularly since 1972, the number of fatalities of elderly travelers has continued to increase steadily. This increase is cause for concern for both the elderly driver and for other persons on the roads who might be placed in danger through crashes involving elderly drivers. Over the past century, the numbers of highways, vehicles, and drivers have increased dramatically. It is easy to allow the imagination to run rampant concerning the upcoming quarter century, to visualize super highways and technology-enhanced vehicles and a multitude of elderly, perhaps unsafe, drivers. Because of these concerns, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was tasked with developing a projection system to determine the impact of the elderly driver in the future. The first component of their model, population projections provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, indicates that nearly all subgroups of the elderly population will increase from 50% to 150% by the year 2025. The second component of their projection system involves estimation of the historical determinants of people's decisions to drive. The third component of their projection system estimates the average miles driven for each age-gender-region group. The final component of the modeling system is the crash risk. While the number of elderly drivers and the vehicle miles of travel of elderly drivers are projected to dramatically increase between 2000 and 2025, the crash risk is project to decrease. (Author/publisher)
Abstract