The European Union wants elderly people (70+) to undergo medical tests from now on to prove that they are still capable of driving a car every five years. However, the proposal has been met with a lot of criticism.
Good.
Normalize checking peoples cognitive abilities.
Provided age is not the trigger given that no proof has been provided supporting the age limit.
This is quite a brilliant idea. Although we could argue that everyone of all ages should be somewhat tested every x years. The amount of people that are over confident and forget things on the road is quite scary.
I kind of agree with this, I do think that an exam should be done every so many years, but I don’t think that full on driving test should need to be done. At most maybe a minimal test like make sure you can still do intersections fine and make sure you still know how to use your blinker in Etc but honestly I don’t feel like a full-on test is going to be beneficial for anything, a timed exam with common sense questions such as who has the right away in this situation, or when is it appropriate to go through a yellow, basic stuff
In the case of the eu, this isn’t an actually a driving test; it is more so of a medical test so like vision and memory tests to verify that you still have situational awareness, which I think will do tremendously more then your standard driving test where you may not even hit a situation that requires a lot of situational awareness
Honestly seeing how people drive ~10 years after getting their licence I think we need a kind of test every 10 years, not necessarily because of declining cognitive capacity but just generally forgetting about safety
although it would be pretty expensive to check absolutely everyone
not necessarily because of declining cognitive capacity but just generally forgetting about safety
And because rules, regulations and the reality of traffic changes.
There’s this new move to make roads where bicycles are granted priority more prevalent, but the specific rules of how it works are completely unknown to most people who got their license more than 10 years ago. Same for reserved car sharing parking spots. Same for some rules around electric vehicles, etc. etc.
It would just be good to make sure people who are operating a vehicle are current on the rules of actually driving a car - rather than relying on “that’s how I learned it, back in the day!”
I agree with this except im too cynical to believe people just forget about safety. People learn to pass the test and then drive how ever the hell they like. Granted alot of people are safe but i see far too many people just completely disregarding anyone else on the road and their only goal is to get to the front of the line as fast as possible and screw everone else.
They can retake their test, they will drive safely and carefully that one day and then go right back to being selfish idiots.
I would maybe go as far as to say thst there is a requirement to have a black box installed in all cars that gets switched off/removed after a number of years of safe driving. And if you drive badly or unsafely then your insurance goes up every year until you prove you are safe.
Maybe it goes up by x amount £100 or like 10% or 20% a year until you stop driving badly but remains at the price it was when you start driving safe for 3 years before dropping back down to the price it would be without the increases you incurred. That would stop people from trying to cheat the system.
It may be extreme but if you are driving safely you have nothing to worry about.
Of course we would have to nail down exactly what counts as unsafe driving so it wasnt overly/unjustly critical.
I mean… maybe its a bad idea. But again. If its not you then you needn’t be worried.
I am for it, but I hope they’ll make these tests simple, short and low level. We really only want to remove the ones that a re obviously incapable of driving.
Is there evidence that elder people cause more accidents than younger? I only find opposite data, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37292951
There is a difference why these accidents happen. Young people cause accidents because they are more often risky drivers. Older people more often cause accidents because their cognitive abilities decrease with age.
With driving tests you can reduce the number of accidents for the latter but not the former.
