In the years following the 1988 publication of the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB’s) Special Report 218: Transportation in an Aging Society: Improving Mobility and Safety for Older Persons (TRB 1988), an unprecedented volume of research and development activity on aging occurred in North America, Australia, and Europe. A decade after the report was released, TRB planned and conducted an international conference on the safety and mobility of older persons. The purpose of the conference was to review what had been accomplished in research and implementation since the publication of Special Report 218 and to identify future research and implementation needs for achieving safer mobility for older persons. Funding for the conference was provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; the Federal Highway Administration; the Federal Transit Administration; the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation; the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health; the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Eno Transportation Foundation; the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety; the Beverly Foundation; and TRB. The National Research Council (NRC) appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Richard Marottoli to plan and conduct the conference, which was held November 7–9, 1999, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The conference committee commissioned research papers to be presented and discussed at the conference, planned all aspects of the conference program, and met after the conference to review the information generated and to deliberate on its findings and recommendations for future research and program initiatives designed to meet the challenges ahead. The result of these activities is publication of two separate documents that together provide a comprehensive update to Transportation in an Aging Society. The first, Conference Proceedings 27: Transportation in an Aging Society: A Decade of Experience (TRB 2004, http://trb.org/publications/conf/reports/cp_27.pdf), contains the technical papers commissioned by the committee and presented at the conference. This companion document, Safe Mobility for Older Americans, contains the committee’s summary of research accomplishments during the past decade, committee recommendations, and a discussion of crosscutting issues. This document briefly introduces the problem: America is an aging society. As the proportion of older persons grows and they experience the functional declines that often accompany the aging process, their safe mobility will become a significant national issue.* A discussion of the history of research in this area and suggestions. concerning the future magnitude of potential safety issues based on census projections and current crash rates are included. These introductory materials are followed by a series of committee recommendations that build on those offered by Special Report 218. The committee developed its recommendations on the basis of its deliberations, analyses, and judgment. It drew on the wealth of information generated by the conference as well as on other sources. The recommendations are organized by topic area: strategic considerations, drivers, vehicles, roadway environment, and alternative transportation. Each section also addresses research needs for the specific area of inquiry. Chapter 4, “Crosscutting Issues,” is presented to frame this complex discussion properly. Identifying and characterizing the safe mobility needs associated with older persons lead to an understanding that the issues cannot be isolated by discipline, organization, population segment, transportation mode, or any other taxonomy. This document concludes with a brief summary of the research recommendations offered by the individual authors of the technical papers. Those recommendations appear in their entirety in Conference Proceedings 27. (Author/publisher)
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