HGV renewal for all you over 70’s

[John Elwin]

It has served him well...

[GORDON STREETER]

It is obvious that some people are better at driving than others just like anything else in life. Personally I started driving around fields when I was 13/14 years of age in cars and motorbikes, and then I started work at a garage at 15 and was driving cars in and out of the workshop bays for 2 years before I could drive a car on the road.
Consequently I had no problem in passing a driving test.
I have always thought that some people who are bad drivers never change and always remain bad drivers who are even worse as they get older.
My own sister who is 83 years of age still drives and has never been in an accident, her car is scratch free and has to reverse downhill on a narrow drive between two houses into her garage, so that means I have nothing against the fairer sex.
As for a test after a certain age is a bit of a moot point ! what age 60/70 or what and should it be every year from inception ?
The after 70 application form for your licence renewal is just ridiculous at the moment, I know some people that are virtually blind and are still driving

[Mike Harte]

Originally Posted by GORDON STREETER

As for a test after a certain age is a bit of a moot point ! what age 60/70 or what and should it be every year from inception ?
The after 70 application form for your licence renewal is just ridiculous at the moment, I know some people that are virtually blind and are still driving

It's not just vision deficiencies that are a problem when one gets older, Gordon; you also need to factor in reaction times and awareness of one's surroundings. Those two seem to be fairly major failings with the elderly.

One reads so often about elderly drivers not being aware of where they are, driving around in circles - remember the driver that spent something like 24 hours driving around the M25 thinking that they were somewhere else - and not forgetting those who find themselves driving the wrong way on motorways.

[GORDON STREETER]

Originally Posted by Mike Harte

It's not just vision deficiencies that are a problem when one gets older, Gordon; you also need to factor in reaction times and awareness of one's surroundings. Those two seem to be fairly major failings with the elderly.

One reads so often about elderly drivers not being aware of where they are, driving around in circles - remember the driver that spent something like 24 hours driving around the M25 thinking that they were somewhere else - and not forgetting those who find themselves driving the wrong way on motorways.

Agreed Mike, at the moment I have to keep my wits about me as one minute I am driving a different car in a different country and 3 hrs later it all changes, my vision is very good and I don't wear glasses, I still drive fast but am aware of things up ahead. Although my insurance premium has gone up solely through age I have never been involved in a RTA.

[Tel 911S]

[QUOTE=Mike Harte;4185972]It's not just vision deficiencies that are a problem when one gets older, Gordon; you also need to factor in reaction times and awareness of one's surroundings. Those two seem to be fairly major failings with the elderly.

One reads so often about elderly drivers not being aware of where they are, driving around in circles - remember the driver that spent something like 24 hours driving around the M25 thinking that they were somewhere else - and not forgetting those who find themselves driving the wrong way on motorways.


.There is not much doubt that the worst drivers are the under 25 male types , and insurance companies know this .
One of their problems is that they think they have quick reactions .
It is something physcologists call the " Gunfighter Syndrome ", [ from the old western movies where the young gun would call out the old gunfighter and always get beaten by him ].
The fact is that a natural reaction that comes from a lot of experience is infinitely faster than a reaction that has to be thought about .

So the older more experienced drivers will usually be safer than younger less experienced drivers , because they will often have reacted to a road problem without even thinking about it .

But you can never expect civil servants and politicians to understand reality , and make sensible rules .

[Mike Harte]

Tel, there is some truth in what you say, that experience counts for a lot. I believe,however, the main reason that insurers do not like young drivers, especially male ones, tends to be because too many of them drive too fast, often much too quickly for the prevailing weather conditions or type of road, and as a result, have serious collisions that do not involve any other vehicle. Plus, of course, the boy racers which some of us must have been guilty of as well a long time ago.

There is also the problem that many of these RTCs are as the result of the drivers being over the drink and/or drug limits. Although there are still far too many older drivers who drive when over the limit, and it is not uncommon for the same drivers to do so many times over.

[grantp]

Some years ago I got hold of the official "raw" UK Serious Accident data as part of a performance testing process for a data analysis application is was using at the time. It meant I had several million accident-related records to experiment with when beta-testing the software.

Serious accidents were any when someone was classed as injured in some way that required medical attention or resulted in a death.

The data were a collection of all the records created by the various Police forces dealing with the accidents and any sort of vehicle involved.

I ran some analysis ideas based on age and found that in all years for which I had records (something like 1990 to 2003 iirc) the most common age for someone driving (as opposed to being an involved passenger) to be involved in some way in an injury-causing RTA was mid-thirties and into the forties.

The numbers for young drivers and old drivers were relatively low.

It seemed that, back then, most older drivers most likely stopped driving very much after retirement, possibly because they could no longer afford to nor needed to.

More recently it seems that more and more older people are able to afford to stay mobile and regularly travel for pleasure. And, of course, there has been a trend for people to live longer and perhaps be slightly fitter to travel longer distances than was the case previously, given the sort of vehicles available now compared to then.

The peak of involved people by age in the 35 to 45-ish bracket perhaps simply reflected the probability that more people in that age range were likely to be driving more miles than most for work as well as commuting and leisure purposes.

I considered the possibility of bad data and skewed records, for which there was some evidence, but did not find anything that seemed likely to be consistently poor in ways that could be seen to influence the age data specifically. (other than notable spikes of people aged 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and so on, where age approximations at the time of data collection had not been followed up for precision.)

What became obvious during the analysis was the absence of related information about total numbers of driving licences held by age, hours driven per annum, distances driven per annum, number of un-licenced drivers involved, number of registered vehicles in total number of vehicles actually in use, etc., etc., were all factors that were really needed to be able to make any sense at all of the accident stats for road safety purposes.

Part of the problem that was creeping in over the years was that the authorities seemed to be keen to make things as opaque as possible.

Each year's data seemed to take about 18 months after the end of the year, to be checked and prepared before release. Yet it still had obvious errors in significant numbers of records and various inconsistencies that seemed to originate right at the start of the collection exercise.

In the later years of data, a decision had been made to remove the field that identified whether an involved driver had tested positively for drink driving. The official reason offered was "Privacy Protection". However, the data was quite well anonymized as far as general information was concerned. No Names were provided.

If anyone was familiar with a specific accident they might be able to work out which driver was which, especially if they knew the accident report number allocated by the police force involved and the individuals concerned.

If they were really smart they could probably find the reports of drink driver prosecutions in local newspapers and get all the details they could ever want from the reports.

The official reason for the change seemed illogical, even taking the growth of internet access into account and any privacy concerns that might have been triggered. (Unlikely back then.) Plus the fact that one needed to jump through a few hoops and persuade the guardians of the official data that you had a valid purpose for asking for access and a passcode to get to and download the files. No clicking of public web links on those days.

That, plus the way they did it being disruptive for analytics purposes, led me to question how useful any analysis might really be. For example, were there other, less obvious but more important issues with the records?

In subsequent years the authorities started to pre-analyse the data before release. Which was nice of them but one could not be sure that what was reported by the analysed results had a good correlation to the raw data originally collected.

I have not looked at the official stuff for a few years. Maybe I should, out of interest, to see how it is being presented now.

[Lancsbreaker]

Interesting programme on ITV last night (viewable on ITVX - Tonight - Elderly drivers, putting the brake on ) on this topic. Tended to come down on the side of the need for 0ver-70s to have eyesight tests (which I can't argue against ) but concluded the likelihood of government action on anything like re-testing was unlikely. Insurance companies however see the elderly as rich pickings......as many of us know. Milady is 88 next month (I was her toyboy ) and has hardly driven for the last few years. I'm trying to get the courage to suggest we don't renew her insurance and get rid of her car when the insurance is next due.....it did less than 1500 miles between last MOT's, and most of that was with me driving.....

[GORDON STREETER]

Originally Posted by Lancsbreaker

.....it did less than 1500 miles between last MOT's, and most of that was with me driving.....

It is difficult to actually ask or tell your spouse to give up their independence and luckily my wife is several years younger than me, however I don't know what I would say if she asked me ! I had one old spinster lady customer that did less than 120 miles between Mots for 3 years and 10 of them was me taking and returning it !
My own father actually decided to stop without any of us mentioning it when aged 84.

[GreenMachine]

I have just had my post-75th birthday annual 'Fitness-to-Drive' assessment, basically just a visit to the Doc who does it on-line to the Authorities, this for a car license. When I turn 85(!) I will have to do a driving test every two years.

When I recently renewed my motor sport L2S license (speed, not W2W), I did it on-line, no test, no doctor.

An ex-GF's mother, 80+, was a terrible driver. She only drove short distances around town, but was an accident waiting to happen - the car had lots of scrapes, but eventually one of the children pulled the trigger on her. It was the best thing, she moved out of the old house on the quarter acre, into a retirement village, and was much happier (and safer).

[Smartie]

The form is asking questions about the applicants medical condition. If you don't have a Cardiac problem section h "Cardiac investigations" is answered No, hence the resting ECG question does not need an answer.