Everybody loves a good April Fool’s prank, but the importance of adopting safe driving practices is no joke. Every year, more than 32,000 Americans lose their lives in violent and largely preventable traffic crashes. By doing your part to be a more responsible, safe, and informed road user, you can help protect yourself, your loved ones, and others who share the road with you. To that end, we’re launching an effort to set the record straight on some common myths about traffic safety, the first of which is presented below. We may not know how these misperceptions came to be, but we do know one thing: hard data show that those who buy into them have been fooled! Myth: “Beware Older Drivers: They Endanger Us All”. No doubt you’ve heard this concept expressed in some way by people who believe that older drivers pose a great threat to those around them. While certain highprofile crashes have indeed had tragic outcomes and garnered significant media attention, the fact remains that the older-driver-as-menace myth remains just that: a myth. In terms of involvement in crashes per mile driven, the very safest drivers on the road are drivers in their forties, fifties, and even sixties. Compared to the very safest drivers, drivers in their seventies indeed do have higher crash rates, but they’re virtually identical to the crash rates of drivers in their thirties. On average, drivers in their mid- to late-eighties still have lower crash rates per mile driven than drivers in their early twenties, and roughly half the crash rates of teenagers. But what about fatal crashes? Drivers ages 65-69 have the same fatal crash involvement rate as drivers in their thirties. Even 75-year-old drivers have fatal crash rates equivalent to those of drivers in their late twenties. In fact, it is not until age 85 and up that older drivers overtake teens and begin to experience the highest rate of fatal crash involvement of any age group. While it is true that older drivers are involved in the most fatal crashes in relation to how much they drive, that does not mean that they are the biggest threat to you and me. Fatal crash rates alone do not paint a complete picture. Beginning at age 65, a pattern emerges with older drivers that only gets more pronounced over time: they become much more of a danger to themselves (black line with squares on the following chart) than to others (red line with dots). This is because the primary danger facing older drivers is fragility, which refers to the increasing inability of bones and tissue in aging drivers to withstand injury due to a crash.1 In other words, the reason fatal crash involvement rates skyrocket for those over age 85 is that these drivers are so much more likely to die when they do crash, not that they pose a great deal of risk to others. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting