The rationale behind age based population screening for fitness to drive is to increase the road safety for both the older drivers themselves and for other road users. It intuitively makes sense to “remove risky drivers” from the driver population and thereby increase the road safety for all. Consequently, age-based screening of older drivers is used as a safety measure in most European countries. However, there are two problems with this. First, older drivers generally do not have increased accident risk that calls for the society to invest in a costly age-based population screening, and second, according to research literature, aged based population screening does not succeed in producing the desired safety benefits. Contrary to common belief older drivers are in fact generally the safest group of drivers. Various factors have contributed to the belief that older drivers are risky drivers. For many years the U- shaped curve was often presented in talks about older drivers’ accident risk. It illustrates accident risk as the number of accidents per exposure (driven kilometres) in different age groups. The curve shows a high accident rate for the youngest drivers, while the rate decreases for the middle aged group only to increase again at around the age of 65 — 70. The U-shaped curve has been interpreted to illustrate how chronological age as such influences the accident risk. However, recent research has identified biases that can account for the trend shown in the U- shaped curve and thereby document that increased chronological age per se is not associated with higher accident risk. The main biases are the frailty bias and the so-called low mileage bias (Hakamies-Blomqvist, 2003). This document is a brief summary of selected parts of the two Danish reports: “Aldring, demens og bilkørsel” (Siren & Meng, 2010) and “Helbredsmæssig kontrol ved ældre bilisters kørekortsfornyelse — Evaluering af de sikkerhedsmæssige effekter af demenstesten” (Siren & Meng, 2010), from DTU Transport, Denmark. (An article on the results of the empirical part of the latter report is forth coming entitled ”cognitive screening of older drivers does not produce safety benefits”). By Annette Meng, Standing Committee of traffic Psychology, EFPA & Anu Siren, DTU Transport, June 2010. (Author/publisher)
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