The facts have got in the way of a good story again.
I was going to write about the outrage of the ACT charging aged pensioners more for third party insurance and registration than any other state or territory. The question arose during the week when a woman who moved from Victoria was hit for $502.50 compared to the charge in Victoria of $151.25. Victoria has the lowest charge for pensioners.
I was going to write that the aged pensioners should get much bigger discounts because they only drive to church on Sunday and are not responsible for all the death and mayhem on the road caused by younger drivers.
The argument for discounting insurance for the aged is that they are much more careful drivers. They drive more slowly. The leave greater space between the car in front. And so on. These habits, it is argued, more than compensate for any problem with reduced reaction time, poor eyesight and less neck mobility.
Alas, statistics and analyses provided by the Federal Office of Road Safety, the NRMA, the NSW Road Traffic Authority and Monash University Accident Research Centre paint a different picture.
Over 70s make up for 7 per cent of the driving population. Yet they comprise 13 per cent of drivers killed and 9 per cent of drivers seriously injured.
Okay, let’s take on the fact that older drivers are more likely to die from similar injuries than younger people because they are less robust. Alas, the oldies are still not out of the woods. Oldies make up only 9.6 per cent of all deaths, but they make up 13 per cent of driver deaths. In short, when an oldie is behind the wheel (and more likely to be the cause of the crash) the death rate goes up substantially.
It gets worse. Older drivers tend to take shorter trips. So they are getting killed on the road more, even though they are on the road less.
Though they are only 7 per cent of the driver population they account for 25 per cent of driver road deaths and injuries per kilometre travelled. Fifteen over-65 drivers die for every billion kilometres travelled. Only four aged 45 to 54 die. And 150 over 65 drivers are seriously injured for each billion kilometres travelled, compared to only 60 who are aged 45 to 54.
Remember we are talking drivers here, not pedestrians or passengers.
True, the under 25s are worse. They kill themselves and their passengers at more than double the average. But we still have to recognise that aged drivers present a problem, which is likely to get worse with the aging population unless it is worked on.
One of the key points is to get aged drivers themselves to recognise there is a problem. This is very difficult. I imagine that the few over-60s drivers who have not already turned the page in disgust are by now fuming. But please bear with me.
When road carnage levels got unbearable in the late 1960s, the public demanded more safety devices in cars and better roads. And tolerated greater legal and police measures.
But most of the improvements in car safety devices and road engineering were swallowed up by what Professor Gerald Wilde of Queen’s University in Canada calls risk homeostasis. Under this theory, people have a set amount of risk they are prepared to take and if conditions change to they will change their behaviour to keep the risk level the same. So someone might travel at 70km/h on a dirt road on the way to work. If the same road is widened and sealed they will move up to 90km/h, keeping the risk the same and picking up the time benefit, rather than lowering risk by staying at 70km/h. Someone with a seatbelt, air-bag, roll-bars, anti-lock brakes and cushioned bumpers then travels faster around corners and in the wet than they would without these things.
In general, a lot of the road-toll benefit expected from the road and car improvements were swallowed up by people travelling faster. The real impact on the road toll came through tougher legal enforcement: fines for no seat belts, radar, red-light and speed cameras and random breath-testing. The reason these worked is because drivers had whole new areas of risks to consider: fines and loss of licence. But these affected people aged from 17 to 55, particularly those between 25 to 55. They have had very, very little affect on people over 55, particularly people over 65. These people had a very low incidence of speeding, running red lights, drink driving or not wearing seat belts in any event. The new wave of traffic policing did not affect their driving behaviour.
The significant drop in the road toll since 1985 has passed the oldies by. They have not benefited much from the 30 per cent reduction in the road toll in the past decade. They are killing and injuring themselves almost at 1970s’ rates. It is not good enough. Oldies have benefited as pedestrians and to a lesser extent as passengers, but not as drivers. And it is standing out more now that the death and injury rate for drivers in other age groups fall.
There are no solid statistics to prove it, but it is also likely that oldies travel less in bad conditions, like bad weather and at night, so more of their crashes are in good conditions. It means their driving is worse than the statistics suggest.
So any suggestion that we should give older people rebates on their third party insurance or registration because they inflict less damage to themselves or others on the road is nonsense.
But there may be all sorts of other reasons to give rebates. Mobility is important for people’s physical and mental well-being. Older people with less money should be encouraged to stay mobile. The ground for reducing registration and insurance is not lower risk but a reduced capacity to pay. But perhaps that is better dealt with by higher pensions and lower tax for self-funded retirees because there are a lot of older people who do not drive who do not get the subsidy.
In any event, some more research and imaginative suggestions are needed to dispel popular misconceptions about aged drivers and help them benefit from generally lower road tolls.
But it is a very difficult proposition to tell someone who has been driving for decades that they might be posing a risk to themselves and others and that they need to recognise it and monitor their driving skills and their general medical capacity to drive. There would be no harm in having restricted licences (daytime and home-town only, for example) which could even attract free registration and very low insurance. And no doubt there are other possibilities.