You disagree that you’re lacking compassion for the elderly, I disagree that poor planning by the elderly is the problem.
Poor life planning by the elderly isn’t the public’s problem to solve. It’s a purely personal issue, nobody’s business but the individual’s. If you’re trying to solve that one, good luck.
Poor driving IS a problem that should be addressed. And it’s cause is not poor life planning by the elderly. Come up with solutions for poor driving and especially for DUI and progress can be made. Simply blame the elderly and IMHO you’re barking up the wrong tree.
I think it’s safe to say we’ve both made our arguments and disagree adamantly on the issue of adding more regulations and burdens to the elderly. However you’ve not offered a suggestion for the millions of rural dwellers across the nation that have become elderly other than to move to a city or to assisted living facilities. Or to get into nursing homes and get stripped of their life savings. Simply saying they didn’t plan well is useless. And it blames them for issues they didn’t cause.
I think in fairness to everyone else we should agree to disagree and move on to other problems. We’re clearly going around in circles with this one. I’m moving on.
I just renewed my driver’s license. They made me take a vision test even though I haven’t been in any accidents or gotten any tickets. Why? What reason did they have to suspect I wouldn’t pass??
I know some older people that have forgotten, or choose to ignore, some of the most basic rules. 40 or 50 years of doing something without any reinforcement will do that to you. Not to mention some of the wacky ideas like- as long as I stop behind the person at the stop sign ahead of me, I can go too. It’s the law you know! nope, never was either. Do that on a driving test and you’d quickly discover the error of your ways rather than believing it for 40 years…
One can be absolutely anal about obeying traffic laws to the letter, yet still be an unsafe driver and one can play loose with stop sign rules and still drive safely.
There was a small speed trap town somewhere near Lubbock TX that gave tickets to everybody that failed to come to a complete stop for at least three seconds, using the stop sign as a gotcha to give out tickets. There was unlimited visibility, you could clearly see if there was a car coming that you needed to stop for. After much outcry from drivers caught in this trap, the state of Texas stepped in and replaced the stop sign with a yield sign.
I see a lot of needless stop and especially needless 4-way stop signs on lightly traveled roads, which I think are only there to serve as speed bumps.
Yep I think I’ll just refrain from saying much more and we’ll just agree to disagree on the issues. I do have a great concern for the folks that are aging and dealing with life changes. I’m also not sure family members are the proper ones to be making decisions for someone. “I’ll decide for myself so butt out of my life”. In Minnesota like I said, it is the doc or the police that can suggest a person take a drivers test, not a family member.
I watched my BIL’s dad go through the whole thing. He lived in a a town of 500 all his life and had a business there for many years. That was his home and expecting him to move to a large city, you might just as well have shot him. So he had a few dents on his car but nothing serious-mostly his garage. In a small town he could drive a few blocks to the grocery store, honk and they would come out and get his grocery order. He finally did give up his car, but he bought a tractor and drove that out the few miles to his investment farm. Then he just got a golf cart and that seemed to do well until stroke time and died shortly after.
I think it is easy to try and stereotype but each situation is different. My own dad did just fine until 88 when he ended up in the nursing home. I always tried to support what he wanted to do both before and after he died. Some people though are more concerned about their own wishes than the people they should be representing. At any rate there are worse things than driving 20 MPH on a rural road when senses maybe aren’t as sharp as they used to be. Not everyone lives in the crowded east or west coast.
As much as I love my (now late) mother, I’ll say, that the last two years she was driving a car, it was a menace and the car showed that. I tried 3 or 4 times to tell her, that maybe she should reconsider whether she should be driving or not, but I ended giving up, as every time, the only result was me getting a new hairstyle.
She was the most lovable, caring, quite, generous and adorable person I’ve ever met and the best cook on top of that, but, boy, jeez, would she get mad if somebody said, she couldn’t drive a car. There was no pardon.
I’ll support an exam. of all drivers with a regular interval - say 10 years from getting a d/l.
And in that MG Midget, I’ll happily do it every day.
Driving a vehicle is not a right, it’s a privilege. With privileges comes responsibilty.
You and me have one thing in common. We both have one vote so doesn’t matter how vocal our opinions are. No problem though, I’ve been canceling out my wife’s votes for years.
Vision can change subtly. I think you need 20/40 to pass the vision test, but could probably drive carefully and successfully with significantly worse. I assume you had a peripheral vision test, too. This can change and not be noticed without testing.
Read my post in the context of the arguments regarding periodic road testing being unnecessary because no harm has been done. You made my point. Subtle changes over time affect people’s abilities, sometimes without them realizing it. Physical, cognitive, etc.
And as I have said countless times and which you have either missed or are intentionally ignoring, I am not advocating that we test only old people. I’m advocating that every driver be subjected to routine testing, even those much younger than me.
And as you seem unable to comprehend, your solution routinely tests people with excellent driving records. And testing people with good driving records instead of focusing our resources on people with bad driving records will solve nothing.
Now let’s see if you can comprehend this: we routinely let people with multiple DUIs and/or moving violations free to create chaos on our roads, even after their licenses are suspended. What do you propose we do about that… besides universal periodic testing? Periodic universal periodic testing will only penalize those with good records to try to control those serious threats to our safety.
Now knock off the insults. I haven’t missed or ignored anything. I simply disagree with you. Period.
We did the same thing with my father and my mother-in-law. Neither one had an accident or ticket for decades, yet both were driving too long. My father was only 71 when we took his keys. H couldn’t see - especially at night. But he was too stubborn to give up his driving. My mother-in-law could see, but her driving became very erratic…and then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Old age creeps up on you and you may not notice it. An outside observe needs to step in. Some older people don’t have family (aka third party) to step in. And some parents still will drive (or try to) even after the kids take the keys.
I understand that completely and advocate for it because I do not improperly associate correlation with causation. As I’ve said before, the Shuttle had a perfect record of not killing anyone until it killed everyone on board. Your position advocates for doing what NASA did regarding Shuttle safety problems - namely, ignore them until they cause a disaster.
It is entirely possible to be a terrible driver yet be accident free because you get lucky and everyone around you avoids the wrecks you nearly cause.
I’ll give you an example from my family of why I advocate what I advocate. My dad had a degenerative disease that over time destroyed his muscles. By the end he couldn’t even lift his own hairbrush. But he still had a drivers’ license and would go in, in his power wheelchair, to get it renewed just for ID purposes - he finally stopped driving when he could no longer transfer from his wheelchair to the driver’s seat but before that, he drove himself to and from work.
This was someone whose muscles had become so weak that he couldn’t get his hands above the bottom of the steering wheel. He’d slowly shuffle the wheel when he turned (one-handed, because the other hand was on the pedal hand control), which meant he had to drive extremely slowly so he had time to turn the wheel far enough. And had there ever been a situation where he had to avoid a wreck, he’d have been screwed because he simply couldn’t turn the wheel fast enough to do it.
He had a clean driving record, but there’s no way on Earth he should have been behind the wheel. And this was a guy in his late 50’s when he was still driving.
And that’s just an extreme example - there are plenty of people who are in perfectly good health and who are in their prime, but who are terrible, dangerous drivers that despite being a vehicular menace, have managed not to kill anyone yet.
I advocate for trying to catch and correct those drivers before they kill or maim someone - not after.
Yeah we all have our anecdotal stories. I had to flip the switch on the welder for my dad because he didn’t have the strength to do it, but he could still weld and drive at 88-just couldn’t flip the switch. Yeah I’m moving on too like I said before.