Summary
At 85, Vonciel Gray decided to stop driving after a stressful experience, joining millions of older Americans facing a loss of independence. Her son, Kurt, a traffic safety expert, helps families navigate the difficult conversation about when to stop driving.
With an aging population, experts warn of a “mobility gap” as older adults seek alternatives to driving.
Joseph Coughlin’s MIT Age Lab explores how vehicle technology can aid or distract older drivers, yet acknowledges that tech can’t always replace the need for older adults to relinquish their keys for safety.
They need to treat the root of the problem by fixing up public transit.
That works if you live in a city. I live in a town of 8900, and my elderly father who developed epilepsy and can no longer drive, lives on his farm 20 miles away. Public transportation will not do anything for him.
In my state there are rural transportation buses. It’s not perfect, but they get used a lot.
My semi-rural county has a separate transit system for this population. You call on scheduled days to go to the grocery, pharmacy, medical center, etc. On pharmacy day they then pick up everyone who scheduled, at their house like a school bus, and go the pharmacy for however long it takes to let everyone do their business before returning them home.
Nice! Come to think of it there are some other transport services around here, as well. I tend to ride my bike most anywhere I want to go, so I don’t think about all the other options.
How does that work with doctors appointment. I doubt everyone could get it scheduled for the same day and it would take very long for everyone to have an appointment especially if there are tests and such.
The retirement community my elderly uncle lived in worked with a local hospital that would schedule all the appointments for the same day, around the same time. They had almost every specialty in the same building so the residents could see the various doctors they needed. But if you had your own doctor at a separate place, you could schedule it ahead of time and they would drive you there. However this was a high-end community that cost a lot, so I’m sure if cheaper places would offer the same options.
To be honest, I have no idea. I don’t know all the particulars, just the broad strokes and that my couple elderly neighbors that use it seem to really value it.
A town I grew up in had 9k people… Yet had several bus lines just fine. Why are you accepting excuses like that? I could have gotten on a bus from one grandparent to another 2 villages over (with a change).
You need to get it out of your head and stop saying “it can’t happen” like rest of the world hasn’t solved this decades ago. The sooner you realise you’re not special edge case, the sooner you’ll get close to what rest of the world takes for granted.
Public transport could do something for him if it was invested in more and we valued the community enough to provide better senior transport options.
Public transport does not need to make a profit.
I never said it needed to. In fact, I almost added into my comment “if we valued the community enough to operate at a loss” but didn’t think it was necessary.
I just wanted to add to it
It mostly certainly could.
So what do you do? My Mom lives in a very car dependent area and I haven’t found any options. While she doesn’t drive often, she shouldn’t at all. However I haven’t found anything besides Uber gift cards and she won’t use them (plus that’s expensive)
My brother in law and I drive him a lot. My mom makes him feel guilty for asking for help.
Well tell her to knock it off. Wtf
In my case, unfortunately most of us no longer live in the same state as my Mom. I have one brother remaining there and he does what he can, but there’s only so much we can lay on him
This. I’m in a town with a population under 2500, and the nearest city is around 30 miles away. Even the small local grocer that just carries basic goods is something like 5 miles away.
Your family has chosen to live in a place where public transit may not be effective. Your personal choices do not invalidate the benefits that public transport has for the large majority of people. Even if you don’t use it, you benefit from dropped emission levels.
It’s crazy how hard it is to show Americans that public transit helps with so many issues in our communities. We’ve had generations of people now who have never even ridden a bus. Our cities were demolished for cars so we’re building our way out of a huge infrastructure deficit in the face of a populace who doesn’t understand just how damaging cars are to everything around.
The flip side of the headline: “How society is grappling with older drivers refusing to hang up their keys”
My grandfather was allowed to drive a car in Florida after a stroke he never fully recovered from, while still nonverbal. And my grandmother, who couldn’t drive, had him keep doing it.
That should not be allowed, no matter how hard it is to get around without a car. There have to be better solutions for seniors in public transportation deserts than Uber/Lyft.
On a related note, I’ve been thinking lately about how many older men have gone absolutely batshit on me for suggesting that they may not be able to safely pee standing up anymore. Its so hardwired in some of them that sometimes even bilateral amputees with enough dementia will insist that they need to stand up to pee. I’ve literally pulled back the blankets to show them their missing legs and they look right back up at me and keep yelling at me to get out of the way.
It’s happened so much at this point that I’m very desensitized to it. They’ll be threatening to kill me and I’m just “ah yes the good ol’ standing piss argument.” It’s practically as developmentally normal as a toddler not being able to share toys or a teenager having an unstable personal identity. Not sure what the female equivalent is, most of the violence I receive from that population seems to relate to trauma / fear related to sexual assault; they have difficulty calmly accepting assistance toileting because they’re worried I’m going to hurt them vs it being less common to be a pride issue with women. Although I suppose the pride just boils down to a fear of being taken advantage of for being weak.
TLDR; loss of independence is rough and in addition to the driving thing there’s a few other interesting manifestations.
I’m a reasonably fit dude in his 30s and I sit down to pee because I’m lazy.
Also I got a shower bench because those fuckers are comphy.
Standing up to pee is probably connected in their head to being a man, so not being able to stand up and pee is a loss of their manhood.
Toxic masculinity is deeply Boomer. We have all been tangentially affected by it for decades.
Bingo. This is my interpretation as well.
The female equivalent is probably hoverers who piss all over the toilet seat
It’s a tough call. Last bit of independence for someone feeling their world getting smaller. Anecdotally, both my father and father-in-law damaged their cars (one hit the highway median after dozing off) and their wives told them they couldn’t afford to replace the cars. Fortunately, nobody got hurt but it could have been a lot worse.
Having seen my mom, and now the mom of my ex, devolve into dangerous drivers, I will trust my kids on this. If they say I am not driving well, I will not drive. Luckily everything is nearby, I haven’t needed to drive much since we moved close to my work.
Walking distance to hospital, doctor, restaurants, dentist, bank is online, driving has become a convenience not a need, thankfully.
We need to give road tests every 5 years or so, to everyone who holds a driving license. My road test was literally more than 40 years ago, how do they even know I can still drive safely?
Yet you appear to be willing to stop driving when it’s clearly a problem. There’s a good sized segment if the population who will do the right thing, given a chance. How do we give people a chance? How do we get more within walking distance, improve accessibility, find reasonable cost transportation, affordable delivery services? How do we establish “third places” where people can exercise a social life without driving there?
Not sure. For me, I have a large family, and do yoga classes in person, work at the office, not from home, go to get coffee always at the same place so see the same people, and have need for more alone time than I ever get, so it hasn’t been an issue yet. Transportation would help a lot here. I used to see old people at aerobics classes downtown when I did those, so group exercise I do think is valuable.
Not to get political but not sure what will happen now with the large family, as Florida gets ever more backwards the kids may get more distributed in other places. We have a house I love in a neighborhood I love, in a blue-leaning city, and don’t want to abandon it. They are second generation but instead of the progress I saw during my adulthood and their childhood, but as they reached adulthood now the pendulum is swinging back.
