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One Neighborhood’s ‘Bizarre Culture War’ Over Bike Lanes
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Old people shouldn't be on the road in the first place. But many can still ride a bike, just like many people with disabilities can't drive but can ride.
Old people drive better than16-29yo when using objective safety benchmarks. Check the iihs.org website https://www.iihs.org/topics/older-drivers#age-and-driving-ability I often advocate for raising the driving age to 25. There's no secret young drivers contribute a disproportionate share of car related damage to society. As a bonus, raising the driving age will make autonomous vehicles safer since we moved the goalposts into a safer direction. It's easy to make an AV safer than the average driver when the stats are skewed by young drivers
The summaries in that link don't seem to indicate that older drivers are safer, but sure, young men in particular have been shown to take more risks in their driving which is unsurprising.
But why not both? Minimum of 25, maximum of 80. Or failing that, additional testing on both ends of the spectrum.
We would need massive changes to our transportation systems before raising the minimum age to 25. Most people have a full time job by that age and are much less dependant on their parents to get around. I also think raising the age isn't the best solution overall, you'd have to wait until 25 or older to start a career with driving including trades, bus drivers, truck drivers, emergency services personnel, and many other jobs. We can't expect the fire department to take a tram to the fire.
Sure, there could be exceptions and I'm operating under the assumption that viable alternatives to driving already exist so people can get to work. Most of those driving based careers require specialised licences already I would assume (I'm not from the US), so that could be worked into the hypothetical legislation.
Higher license requirements would help, but could be hard to enforce depending on the implementation. Beyond that, we are back to road design issues which may well be a better way to solve all this. Make roads and cars so safe that even a drunk person won't kill themselves or others (including pedestrians and cyclists), and then you've got a well designed system.