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.
There’s a pretty serious concern here about the mobility and independence of the elderly… but that can’t be put over and above public safety. I see either very anxious and hesitant, or completely off with the fairies and uncaring elderly drivers on a frequent basis.
They wouldn’t get anywhere near a licence if they had to demonstrate their competence even once more, let alone semi-regularly.
Mobility for the eldery IS important but IMHO there should be affordable, easy accessible options without the use of a personal vehicle. Otherwise it get’s harder and harder for the eldery to participate in social activities which are beneficiary to mental health and prevent early symptoms of Alzheimers disease.
Finally some EU law that makes sense.
Good, I completely agree with this. Maybe once they hit 80, every year.
Why 80 years old even needs to drive? Their reflexes are slow, their vision is bad, their hearing is catastrophic. Why just dont let someone drive them/use taxi/public transport?
If they would do that we would finally get a strong lobby for decent public transport!
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
