Re:Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed o...
by bsanr on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:38PM
(#20403639)
>Police-reported
So the parent established that, in his case, a crash took place but was not recorded by the police. Police are known to give the benefit of the doubt to certain classes of people, leaving incidents that they cause outside of formal records and review. Is this a widespread phenomenon that could skew the data presented in your citation? I think that's worth investigating.
https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
From this, 60s is peak age range for driving safety.
In the 70s people are still good.
80+ are still pretty good in the "All crashes" and "Injury crashes" categories (a little better than people 25-29, a little worse than people 30-39), but they are really bad in "Fatal crashes" -- even a little worse than 16-17yo.
Digging into the fatalities, the spike in deaths caused by old people are themselves and not passengers or others.
So I guess the motivation for driving tests for old people would be to protect them from themselves and should apply to people 80+.
If we want to protect people from bad drivers generally, we should really want to do something about 16-17yos (just pushing back the driving age might not do it because inexperience is probably a significant factor). Actually something like more monitoring/training/tests for drivers, say, 16-24 would be the best place to start. (Drivers 25-29 are also a problem, but presumably if you improve younger drivers the older age range will take care of itself as the good young drivers age.)