Arguments Against Elderly Drivers
As a senior citizen was driving down the freeway, his cell phone rang. Picking up, he heard his wife, her voice high with anxiety; warning him, "Henry, I just saw on the news that there's one car driving the wrong way on Highway 880. Please be careful!" Henry replied, "What do you mean one? You've got to be kidding me. I see at least a hundred!" Elderly drivers are one of the rising issues in our society nowadays and it’s no joke. Little attention has been given to it despite the increasing number of accident caused by such. Tests for elderly drivers should be made mandatory and restrictions should be placed on some of them to add more safety and reduce accidents to our roads. Aging is a part of life, it is inevitable and people degenerate
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Perhaps the most controversial in the Dallas area is the Grimes case. In a news article in USA Today, Elizabeth Grimes, a widow who had lived on Meaders Lane for 50 years, had backed out of her driveway, across her lawn and off the curb. Her 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis then hit the curb across the street, Prager recalls, before Grimes mistook the gas pedal for the brake and "took off with a jackrabbit start." Six blocks away, Grimes drove through a red light. The car slammed into Katie Bolka, a 17-year-old high school junior who was driving to school to take an algebra test. Five days later, Bolka died. Another incident was in California, when George Russell Weller, then 86, killed 10 people and injured more than 70 when he drove his Buick Le Sabre into a crowded farmers market in Santa Monica on July 16, 2003. In Rochester, New York, an eighty-nine year-old man drove “into pedestrians and vendors at an open-air public market”, injuring himself and nine market goers. The police said that the man’s foot “apparently slipped off the brake and hit the …show more content…
From ages 75 to 84, the rate of about three deaths per 100 million miles driven is equal to the death rate of teenage drivers. For drivers 85 and older, the fatality rate skyrockets to nearly four times higher than that for teens”, as written by Davis and DeBarros on a USA Today report dated May 1, 2007. The statistics involving fatal accidents are similar in both age groups; however the number of accidents involving older drivers will continue to rise as the elderly population continues to
Perhaps the most controversial in the Dallas area is the Grimes case. In a news article in USA Today, Elizabeth Grimes, a widow who had lived on Meaders Lane for 50 years, had backed out of her driveway, across her lawn and off the curb. Her 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis then hit the curb across the street, Prager recalls, before Grimes mistook the gas pedal for the brake and "took off with a jackrabbit start." Six blocks away, Grimes drove through a red light. The car slammed into Katie Bolka, a 17-year-old high school junior who was driving to school to take an algebra test. Five days later, Bolka died. Another incident was in California, when George Russell Weller, then 86, killed 10 people and injured more than 70 when he drove his Buick Le Sabre into a crowded farmers market in Santa Monica on July 16, 2003. In Rochester, New York, an eighty-nine year-old man drove “into pedestrians and vendors at an open-air public market”, injuring himself and nine market goers. The police said that the man’s foot “apparently slipped off the brake and hit the …show more content…
From ages 75 to 84, the rate of about three deaths per 100 million miles driven is equal to the death rate of teenage drivers. For drivers 85 and older, the fatality rate skyrockets to nearly four times higher than that for teens”, as written by Davis and DeBarros on a USA Today report dated May 1, 2007. The statistics involving fatal accidents are similar in both age groups; however the number of accidents involving older drivers will continue to rise as the elderly population continues to