Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport. Cars are dangerous, and if you can't see clearly, you're obviously not fit to drive. It's true that there will be negative impacts on people who will fail the eye tests, and we should be compassionate, but ultimately those people aren't safe behind the wheel, and put other peoples lives at risk, not just their own.
The practical details of implementing this are important - is the eye test done at an ordinary optician/optometrist's shop? How are the results going to be submitted to DVLA, etc.? What protections will be in place to prevent people from shopping around for a dodgy optician (as people often do with cars and MOTs)?
I think this is a reasonable and practical step in the right direction. I accept that given the shortage of driving examiners it would be impossible to require re-testing of existing drivers in the foreseeable future, but as the article says, people already get eye tests frequently and often for free, so this is something that can be done without too much additional infrastructure.
A personal anecdote: my grandfather is in his 90s and is not at all fit to drive due to cataracts and various other issues, but he still does "short journeys" because it's convenient and he feels that it's necessary. The UK has plenty of public transport options and places where people can live with amenities close by (though this is not at all universal). Most British towns and cities are very different from their US counterparts in this respect. My grandfather moved house relatively recently --in full knowledge that the house he chose would benefit from car ownership, and in full knowledge about his age. The only thing that will stop him and others like him from putting people in danger is taking away his licence. He has been told by doctors, opticians and family members that he's not safe to drive, but in the absence of any enforcement he persists. I hope that this policy comes in before he or someone else gets hurt.
You can anonymously report your concerns to the DVLA at [1]. Select "driver's medical". I had to do this with an elderly family member who refused to stop driving despite being manifestly physically and cognitively incapable. Its a difficult call but you may be saving someone's life.
About 10 years ago I quietly parked my Aunt's car in her garage so the driver's side door was about 6 inches away from the garage wall and got out of the passenger door. Although she insisted she was cognitively okay to drive, turned out she wasn't cognitively okay to work out how to get back into her car.
Thank you for this. I was mistakenly under the impression that it was not possible to raise these concerns with DVLA anonymously.
Do you know what the process that follows this looks like? Are they just asked to self-certify again? Are they told that someone has reported them (even if they aren't told who it was)?
What happens after this? Even if they lose their license, what happens to their vehicles? I ask in the context that many people drive without licenses.
The only solution to people driving is viable alternatives to driving.
Under the previous Conservative government, half of UK bus routes ( ~8,000 ) were cancelled[1]. HS2 high speed train route phase 2 the extensions from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds - which would move freight as well as people, freeing up space on local train lines for better passenger transport - was cancelled[2]. Phase 1 of it was due to be opened in 2026-2033 timeframe but was bungled now has no planned opening time, and Reform are calling to scrap that, too. Local council budgets were reduced[3] under the austerity measures, including one consequence of 40% less transport spending. The West Coast mainline was sold from VirginRail to Italy's TrenItalia in 2019[4] (Deutsche Bahn, French SNCF and Dutch Nederlandse Spoorwegen own most of the other UK railways) although this government is bringing Rail them back into public ownership.
And Reform are promising to remove bike lanes, and scrap Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to let cars use residental roads as through-roads again[5][6].
The UK doesn't have it as bad as the USA - but that's not for lack of trying to make car the only way to move.
One of my elderly uncles was in this position, but he was a bit more responsible about it than your grandfather. His way to solve it was like this: he sold his car at a discount to someone else in the same building on the condition that when he needs transport they'll drive him. It works out well, he only uses it when he absolutely has to and the rest of the time he either walks or has stuff delivered. It was a painful decision for him but in the end it worked out well (and I'm the backup driver but I'm about 100 km away from where he lives so it would always take me at least an hour to get there).
> My grandfather moved house relatively recently -- in full knowledge that the house he chose would benefit from car ownership, and in full knowledge about his age.
On the other hand, my grandfather was the exact opposite. He recognized that he would have to move from the country to the city in order to live in a place with adequate public transportation and easier access to medical care. Which he did, and he lived in his own home until he passed away. Likewise, in my university days, I rented a floor in an elderly woman's house. It allowed her to remain independent in a community where she had social connections (e.g. friends and church), health care was easy to access, and everything she needed was within walking distance. To many, renting part of their house out would be unthinkable, but the alternative would be living in a place where everyone is car dependent.
Unfortunately, some people aren't planning with their current or future needs in mind. Or they are unwilling to make compromises in order to address those needs.
The opposite is also true,traditional optometrists seems to do everything possible to try and find a reason for me to wear glasses (i don't, I see fine). They always want to upsell me glasses.
> Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport.
My parents live somewhere that has two buses a week. They could get to the nearest city, then come back two hours later. If they miss the return bus they'd have to wait until next week.
A lot of these things sound great until you actually look at the reality.
> Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport. Cars are dangerous, and if you can't see clearly, you're obviously not fit to drive. It's true that there will be negative impacts on people who will fail the eye tests, and we should be compassionate, but ultimately those people aren't safe behind the wheel, and put other peoples lives at risk, not just their own.
This is an absurd take. I grew up in a town of ~60,000 people in the UK. The public transport, was, and _still_ is terrible. To get to the nearby shopping center which was the only place with bowling and a movie theatre, and any shops that weren't charity shops involved 2 trains and a bus taking about an hour and a half. A drive would be 20 minutes and a negotiation with my parents to give me a lift.
Nowadays my mother is in her 70s and lives in this same town, and drives into the countryside every day to take her mental health walks. Without this, she probably wouldn't be here today. Taking her car away from her would be giving her a death sentence to rot at home on a council estate that she hates living in.
> The UK has plenty of public transport options and places where people can live with amenities close by
I mean this simply isn't true. You must live in London or a bubble.
Interesting to see the deep-dive on "younger car drivers", but not a pip about the old-age drivers. Yet we see from chart 1 that their casualty rate is far worse!
The shift from male to female is fascinating. In younger drivers accidents are disproportionately male, I guess due to high testosterone buffoonery but in older drivers it's disproportionately female. My personal observation is that older male drivers are much more slow and less confident whereas females tend to be overly confident and driving way too fast, especially the ones in huge cars.
According to this women become more dangerous than male 17-24 year old drivers only when they reach 80+ whereas for men they only become more dangerous than female 17-24 year old drivers at 86+.
I actually think more should be done about younger drivers than older.
> The shift from male to female is fascinating. In younger drivers accidents are disproportionately male, I guess due to high testosterone buffoonery but in older drivers it's disproportionately female.
When you correct for population size, I think you’ll see that difference largely, if not completely, goes away. There are more women than men in the UK from age 50 upwards (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-kingdom/2025/)
One reason there are more females in accidents at the oldest ages is because the males are dead. In the UK, the average life expectancy for a female is 82.9 vs 77.9 for men, a 5-year gap.
US has token eye exams at the BMV. I've never seen or heard anyone fail.
During such a test that I could barely read anything, and afterwards realized I could not read most roadsigns--having relied too much on map apps. A visit to the eye doctor confirmed I shouldn't be driving, so I ordered glasses that same day.
Reporting unsafe drivers in my state is not anonymous. And at one point I had to tell a family member that if I found out they were still driving that I'd report them. (They had 3 accidents in 2 years, claiming it's all the computers in the cars.)
When i first got my driver's license in the US I almost failed my eye exam. They gave me 3 chances and I just barely passed on the third. This led to me finally getting glasses.
My mother completely stopped driving in her early 70s... thank god for the Swiss medical driving fitness test! (now at 75 instead of 70?) she was perfectly fine with it, online food order+delivery had become available, and her immediate neighbors were loving people helping her whenever I+siblings were not easily available.
Unfortunately what is needed are tests of driving ability. Most over-70s are significantly worse than the average driver and some are so dangerous they shouldn't be on the road at all.
Politically very difficult to take people's licences away though, especially when it's permanent, not their fault and it makes their life a lot worse.
It is unfortunate that things like this become politically impossible because older people are one of the most reliable voting groups out there.
I will always be bitter that older voters chose Brexit by a large margin, in opposition to the younger voters who will actually be around to feel its long term effects. Not taking that into account in voting feels wrong but there’s no politically palatable way of addressing it.
Didn't the UK just start allowing 16 year olds to vote, which presumably helps offset the impact of older voters? I remember not getting around to voting in my first election (USA, Colorado). The outcome was George W. Bush being elected president, who favored policies not well-liked by younger people at the time.
>It is unfortunate that things like this become politically impossible because older people are one of the most reliable voting groups out there.
They become politically impossible because they're not a front burner issue for anyone so the only people who are driving the issue are extremists who want the criteria set at like 10 whereas normal people want it at like 5 on some arbitrary scale of extremity so whenever it goes up for public consideration it gets shot down. You see this across all areas of mundane policy.
You're taking about statistical averages but I'm talking about a significant minority of over-70s who are wildly dangerous. Most of them only stop driving when they cause an accident. Sometimes its a serious one.
There are already some measures for young people, like the 6 point thing. Maybe there could be more. Doesn't change the facts about dangerous OAP drivers
Yes - I’ve seen the pricing algorithms at several large insurers. Massive surcharges for young people 16-25, rates level out 30-55, and then slowly start to go back up, but it’s a slow increase compared to the young ones.
AIUI, that's a misleading figure, because the elderly self-correct, in awareness of the greater difficulty, by driving a lot less, so the greater danger is masked in the per-unit-time accident rate.
So, in theory, policy could appropriately adjust for this dynamic by only requiring the test of over-70s driving more than X miles/year, but that adds hassle to enforcement.
As European, that has lived across multiple countries, that only applies to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Also healthy enough to be able to walk stairs, as very few places care about people with disabilities, or carrying stuff that is a pain to transport across stairways.
People visit the touristic centre of the main cities and assume we all enjoy nice public transport systems.
I’m an American and my vision, fully corrected, is right at the legal borderline to get a license without restrictions. I’ve never “failed” a vision exam at the DMV; one time the clerk even said, “good enough”. (Don’t worry, I never drive, I only keep my license up to date for serious emergencies).
I know it doesn’t work everywhere, but I’m happy there are services like Uber and Lyft when I get older. I could see myself using those services a lot when I am no longer able to drive.
Nope, even best countries in the world with great public transport like Switzerland have tons of remote places basically unreachable by public transport, or bus that goes 2x a day on some days of the week.
Guess what, mostly old folks live there and all this applies there. Its just not financially feasible to cover everybody. Proper full self driving should fix this, nothing less I am afraid.
I imagine there’s something of a bathtub curve where young (under 25) drivers have higher accident rates due to some combination of inexperience and immaturity, while older drivers (over 70) have higher accident rates due to disability creeping up on them without them noticing.
Agreed over 70s are safer than younger drivers, but consider young drivers in most jurisdictions face restrictions while elderly drivers do not.
Further I’d say anecdotally that past a certain point, certainly by 80s, elderly drivers are not accident free. It’s that they have an increasing number of small accidents until someone takes away the keys. If they do not have someone in their life to do that it’s probably reasonable that the government make that determination.
At some point the reduced vision and reflex speed makes them too hazardous on the road to others, even if they are driving slowly and carefully. Parking lot accidents, hitting kids, slamming the gas instead of the brakes, etc.
I wouldn't say over 70 year olds, average 70 year old is fine. Problem gets a lot worse at 75 or 80. Most these people don't drive nearly as much as younger people anyway.
My grandma is 90 and drives 5 miles to the grocery store, a slow road. I don't think she'd pass a driving test but she drives during the day when barely anyone is on the road, chances of serious injury are nil.
Is it worth it to spend large amounts of money on testing these people, taking their license away if they fail? Getting rid of their car will force them to replace it with someone else driving or cycling which could be a problem in many places. Worst case scenario they'll need to go in a retirement home.
For my parents it was 65-70 when I noticed and started to become very concerned for their ability to drive safety. At 75 now, my dad at least only drives during broad daylight but even so he can't maintain a safe speed and does barely half the speed limit, then complains about tailgaters not liking his "retired lifestyle" (which is his personal excuse for driving slowly, when in reality he lacks the skill to keep up with traffic, which is very dangerous in my view...)
> Politically very difficult to take people's licences away though, especially when it's permanent, not their fault and it makes their life a lot worse.
It shouldn't be permanent. If they can improve, then why not? Maybe illness causes their poor driving and they find a treatment for that illness.
In my experience, the 70+ are bad at driving in ways that do lighter accidents. Typically: Drive 50 km/h everywhere, even if the road is 30 or 70. General weird behaviour. Swerving slowly left right left forever.
They do cause a lot of cursing, but they are signalling hard enough they're bad at driving and other drivers leave huge margins, overly grant right of way, don't cross the road, etc...
Fairly regularly an 80-something will end up driving down the wrong carriageway of a motorway or dual carriageway. Fairly regularly this results in deaths.
In Switzerland we do it all. After 75 there is requirement for periodic health check by doctor which consists of various mental checks and eyesight. I would put it at 70, everybody degrades with age at different pace, some lose it even before 50 (ie sclerosis or parkinson) but cca 70 is an age I can see clear mental decline in every person I ever interacted closely.
Wife is a GP and she regularly faces this at her work. I begged her numerous times to take away those licenses without mercy if the person is unfit, no amount of pleading, begging, crying of threats should change that. And they do it all, oh so much - to the point she is giving up this revenue stream, too much emotional burden (from somebody who sometimes has to tell patients they have ie cancer).
Why so harsh - we live in more rural place with tons of old folks. They are properly dangerous behind the wheel - they can't handle any sudden situation, heavy traffic is a challenge at best, they need to drive at absolute minimum speed at bright daylight to handle situations.
Its tough, they live their whole lives in the middle of nowhere, too stubborn to sell and move someplace more reasonable and without a car they can't easily take care of themselves in their remote places (but its 2026 we have ubers, taxis and home deliveries, and once further down the road good social housings for elderly). Often, they know old but still working doctors who turn the blind eye because they are old buddies and then its sometimes sad news.
When they handle 1.5 tonne of steel that accelerates fast and easily kills others, very easily it stops being primarily about them but about rest of society. When you see them barely managing driving around local primary school, its either them or us/our kids
Of course it makes their lives worse. In a lot of parts of the UK, the public transport is barely fit for purpose, irregular, non-existent (in much of the countryside) or dangerous (in the city). I speak from personal experience. I've been harassed and assaulted on British buses and trains on more than one occasion. Once had to phone the police to get rid of someone who started to follow me home, after he had hit me getting out of a train in a small branch station. It's like the Wild West. In one village I visited, there was only one bus there a day, and a bus back on a different day. How are old people supposed to function with that?
As usual this is set up as a tax farming scheme for the government to make money. They will make tonnes of money off forcing people to reapply for an overpriced licence every three years.
> As usual this is set up as a tax farming scheme for the government to make money. They will make tonnes of money off forcing people to reapply for an overpriced licence every three years.
This is zero-evidence bullshit. On and after the age of 70, all UK drivers have to renew their licence every three years anyway - it's been like that since 1976. This new change just adds a requirement to get an eye test (which the government doesn't "make money" from) as well, rather than self-certifying.
This is good, no? The intent is obvious, it's likely improving the current situation, and I don't see any reason not to applaud it as an low-barrier incremental improvement.
driving in downtown Austin this morning, the waymo swarm is real. the US may not have robust public transit but why can't we subsidize ride shares for seniors who lose their ability to drive safely?
I’m still a couple decades off from “senior”, but I have already reached a point where most day to day driving feels like a chore. If/When Waymo finally arrives in my smallish Bay Area city I can see myself using it a quite a bit. Hopefully self-driving cars are ubiquitous by the time I reach “shouldn’t be driving” age.
When I lived in Charleston the transit system had both subsidized ride share and ADA-compliant ride services (literally a government taxi service) for seniors and the disabled. So it certainly can be done.
> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
Unless I've botched the math and/or what the internet tells me about the size of the characters on a UK number plate is wrong this seems to be a bit overboard.
The internet is telling me that the characters are 79mm tall and 50mm wide (except for '1' and 'I') with a 14mm stroke.
My eyes right now are about 250mm from my monitor. Something that is 79mm tall and 20m away would have the same angular size as something 250mm away that is 79mm / 20m x 250mm = 0.9875mm tall.
If I set the size to 75% in Chrome that is the size of the numbers on this page in the timestamps and the submission points and comment counts. It is about 1/2 the size of the numbers in the text box that I'm writing this comment in.
I've just taken a photo of that and will include a link to it to show how small that is [1]. In that I'm holding a ruler next to the left side of the text. The "180" up where it says "180 points" is what you have to be able to read to pass the test. (If you can't see the photo because Imgur blocks your country just grab a ruler, hold it vertically 25cm in front of you, and the apparent size of the space between the mm marks is the size character you need to read).
I have no idea what road signs and markings are like in the UK, but in the US in ~50 years of driving I don't think I've ever needed to read anything anywhere near that small.
I'm sorry to say your conclusion doesn't hold. I'm not sure where exactly you went wrong, without trying to do the math my best guess would be that you just can't properly simulate a far-sight task in a near-sight environment like that. Our eyes don't work that way.
But if you go outside and do a real world test, you'll (hopefully) find that a number plate should be readable from much further away than 20 meters. If you don't, please go and see an optometrist! I'm serious.
20 m is actually a very lenient requirement IMO. In my country, one should be able to read a number plate from about 35 m easily, and with good eyesight, 65 m and more shouldn't be a problem.
Someone with 20:20 vision can read a UK number plate from about 60m so the 20m standard allows for some eye imperfections. You're allowed to use glasses.
I have some experience because I got a macular hole in one eye which had surgery. With the good eye I can do about 60m, with the problem one about 20.
As a neurologist that certifies driving ability in 80+ yo people, I would say vision is only one factor. Motor dexterity, fresh reflexes and mental capacity are equally or more important but they are not quantified.
> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
I would like to see better tests. I have a pet theory that visual perception deficiencies along the lines of simultanagnosia are considerably more common among older people than is generally recognized, and people with these conditions may be able to easily read letters and numbers at a distance but be unable to drive safely due to inability to reliably detect obstacles.
Visual screening is fairly easy and every bit as quick, but it needs different tests. Something along the lines of an Ishihara plate but with colors that are perceptible even to color blind people might work. Or a visually busy image with instructions to identify one or two particular objects in the scene.
A friend of mine who was cycling in his 60s got hit by a driver in his 80s, taking his regular route to church, but apparently not very observantly. The cyclist was thankfully able to recover.
Does any country have a good system? In Norway it used to be your doctor taking away your license. But that didn't turn out too well. People need to be able to tell their doctor about their issues without fear of "retaliation", and doing it would of course damage the relationship going forward.
So I'm all for doing it, too many old people that shouldn't be on the road, but unsure how.
- Self driving vehicles are truly vs theoretically safer than humans or at least the average 70 year old.
- Self driving vehicles can be attained or reliably rented for an itsy bitsy teenie weenie fraction of a seniors monthly stipend or pension or disability. Reliably meaning no waiting line or shortages of rental self driving cars or vans.
What I’m getting from this discussion is that maybe we should just make this universal, rather than picking an arbitrary age. Too onerous, perhaps, but under-70s definitely can experience serious decline in eyesight.
People forget or don't keep up to date on rules. Some kind of retaking the theoretical parts would at least be nice. For instance the UK has a new highway code (I've heard), and most countries it's quite different to drive now than lets say 20 years ago. For instance the amount of cyclists and the rules around that I feel drivers in Norway have a bad grasp on.
And heck, when I got my license I lived in a remote town, 3 hours away from the nearest street light. Lots of things I got away with not learning, and whatever I memorized for the theoretical test 20 years ago is mostly forgotten. I think many people think they "know" the rules, but really don't
You also have the problem that the pass rate for tests has changed massively in the years since most 50 year olds took their tests in the UK. Anecdotally, it is not at all uncommon for young drivers to fail the test 3+ times (at least amoung the youngsters I know). 30 years ago it was rare to have to take the test more than 2x before passing.
That and the scandal of test slots being bought up months in advance by what are essentially touts, as well as the lack of testers you noted, make it unworkable.
Hmm? Where I live you have to renew your license (basically pass a few medical exams) every 10 years since the day you get your first license. Why wait until 70?
> Nearly one in four car drivers killed in 2024 were aged 70 or older, according to government figures.
So, somewhat less than 25%. Let's guess 23% or whatever.
What are the age demographics? According to 2024 stats, 19.7% of the UK was aged 65 or older. 17% in the 0-14 age range.
Thus 65-year-olds and older make up 23.7% of the population older than 14.
It seems, roughly, as if the proportion of 70-year-olds and older might be more or less in line with their representation in the driving age population.
It's not the statistics we need, but close enough to defeat the alarmist idea of OMG, a whopping quarter (almost) fatalities are 70+; get the old buggers off the roads!
That's not a good counter. I think you need to look at how many of that demographic actually drives, not how big the demographic is. Or maybe kilometers driven per accident.
That onus is on the article: convince me that almost a quarter of the facilities being 70+ means something (s not explained by statistics but follows age).
Why pick on the over-70s though? Most drivers in the UK either can't see or don't bother looking, so we should be demanding higher standards of all drivers.
They won't test everyone on a regular basis due to the cost and because it would be politically unpopular. Heck, I saw someone in their 30's go ballistic about losing their license after having two seizures while driving (both of which resulted in collisions).
Enforcement is another issue. I don't even bother reporting being hit by cars anymore because the police refuse to do anything about it. That is after an incident and with a plate number. Enforcement of people driving without a license would be next to impossible unless there is an incident.
As for "don't bother looking", well, you cannot really test for that since it is usually the result of some form of distracted driving or carelessness. Both of which are unlikely to show up when someone knows they are being assessed.
Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport. Cars are dangerous, and if you can't see clearly, you're obviously not fit to drive. It's true that there will be negative impacts on people who will fail the eye tests, and we should be compassionate, but ultimately those people aren't safe behind the wheel, and put other peoples lives at risk, not just their own.
The practical details of implementing this are important - is the eye test done at an ordinary optician/optometrist's shop? How are the results going to be submitted to DVLA, etc.? What protections will be in place to prevent people from shopping around for a dodgy optician (as people often do with cars and MOTs)?
I think this is a reasonable and practical step in the right direction. I accept that given the shortage of driving examiners it would be impossible to require re-testing of existing drivers in the foreseeable future, but as the article says, people already get eye tests frequently and often for free, so this is something that can be done without too much additional infrastructure.
A personal anecdote: my grandfather is in his 90s and is not at all fit to drive due to cataracts and various other issues, but he still does "short journeys" because it's convenient and he feels that it's necessary. The UK has plenty of public transport options and places where people can live with amenities close by (though this is not at all universal). Most British towns and cities are very different from their US counterparts in this respect. My grandfather moved house relatively recently --in full knowledge that the house he chose would benefit from car ownership, and in full knowledge about his age. The only thing that will stop him and others like him from putting people in danger is taking away his licence. He has been told by doctors, opticians and family members that he's not safe to drive, but in the absence of any enforcement he persists. I hope that this policy comes in before he or someone else gets hurt.
You can anonymously report your concerns to the DVLA at [1]. Select "driver's medical". I had to do this with an elderly family member who refused to stop driving despite being manifestly physically and cognitively incapable. Its a difficult call but you may be saving someone's life.
[1] https://contact.dvla.gov.uk/driver/capture-transaction-type
About 10 years ago I quietly parked my Aunt's car in her garage so the driver's side door was about 6 inches away from the garage wall and got out of the passenger door. Although she insisted she was cognitively okay to drive, turned out she wasn't cognitively okay to work out how to get back into her car.
Thank you for this. I was mistakenly under the impression that it was not possible to raise these concerns with DVLA anonymously.
Do you know what the process that follows this looks like? Are they just asked to self-certify again? Are they told that someone has reported them (even if they aren't told who it was)?
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+1. My brother and I had to do this for my Dad. We felt awful but it was necessary.
What happens after this? Even if they lose their license, what happens to their vehicles? I ask in the context that many people drive without licenses.
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> Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport.
Which is fine if you live somewhere where there is public transport.
The only solution to people driving is viable alternatives to driving.
Under the previous Conservative government, half of UK bus routes ( ~8,000 ) were cancelled[1]. HS2 high speed train route phase 2 the extensions from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds - which would move freight as well as people, freeing up space on local train lines for better passenger transport - was cancelled[2]. Phase 1 of it was due to be opened in 2026-2033 timeframe but was bungled now has no planned opening time, and Reform are calling to scrap that, too. Local council budgets were reduced[3] under the austerity measures, including one consequence of 40% less transport spending. The West Coast mainline was sold from VirginRail to Italy's TrenItalia in 2019[4] (Deutsche Bahn, French SNCF and Dutch Nederlandse Spoorwegen own most of the other UK railways) although this government is bringing Rail them back into public ownership.
And Reform are promising to remove bike lanes, and scrap Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to let cars use residental roads as through-roads again[5][6].
The UK doesn't have it as bad as the USA - but that's not for lack of trying to make car the only way to move.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/map-bus-route...
[2] https://www.railfuture.org.uk/article1904-HS2-Phase-2-cancel...
[3] https://ifs.org.uk/news/core-funding-english-councils-still-...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-a...
[5] https://road.cc/content/news/reform-council-conduct-review-s...
[6] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/lifestyle/reform-councils-...
You have to be pretty remote to have no public transport in the UK.
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True, though maybe that's covered by OP's "The practical details of implementing this are important...".
Then there's the fine detail of affording to live somewhere with public transport. :(
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One of my elderly uncles was in this position, but he was a bit more responsible about it than your grandfather. His way to solve it was like this: he sold his car at a discount to someone else in the same building on the condition that when he needs transport they'll drive him. It works out well, he only uses it when he absolutely has to and the rest of the time he either walks or has stuff delivered. It was a painful decision for him but in the end it worked out well (and I'm the backup driver but I'm about 100 km away from where he lives so it would always take me at least an hour to get there).
> My grandfather moved house relatively recently -- in full knowledge that the house he chose would benefit from car ownership, and in full knowledge about his age.
On the other hand, my grandfather was the exact opposite. He recognized that he would have to move from the country to the city in order to live in a place with adequate public transportation and easier access to medical care. Which he did, and he lived in his own home until he passed away. Likewise, in my university days, I rented a floor in an elderly woman's house. It allowed her to remain independent in a community where she had social connections (e.g. friends and church), health care was easy to access, and everything she needed was within walking distance. To many, renting part of their house out would be unthinkable, but the alternative would be living in a place where everyone is car dependent.
Unfortunately, some people aren't planning with their current or future needs in mind. Or they are unwilling to make compromises in order to address those needs.
The opposite is also true,traditional optometrists seems to do everything possible to try and find a reason for me to wear glasses (i don't, I see fine). They always want to upsell me glasses.
> Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport.
My parents live somewhere that has two buses a week. They could get to the nearest city, then come back two hours later. If they miss the return bus they'd have to wait until next week.
A lot of these things sound great until you actually look at the reality.
> Older people in the UK already have free bus passes and various other substantial concessions regarding public transport. Cars are dangerous, and if you can't see clearly, you're obviously not fit to drive. It's true that there will be negative impacts on people who will fail the eye tests, and we should be compassionate, but ultimately those people aren't safe behind the wheel, and put other peoples lives at risk, not just their own.
This is an absurd take. I grew up in a town of ~60,000 people in the UK. The public transport, was, and _still_ is terrible. To get to the nearby shopping center which was the only place with bowling and a movie theatre, and any shops that weren't charity shops involved 2 trains and a bus taking about an hour and a half. A drive would be 20 minutes and a negotiation with my parents to give me a lift.
Nowadays my mother is in her 70s and lives in this same town, and drives into the countryside every day to take her mental health walks. Without this, she probably wouldn't be here today. Taking her car away from her would be giving her a death sentence to rot at home on a council estate that she hates living in.
> The UK has plenty of public transport options and places where people can live with amenities close by
I mean this simply isn't true. You must live in London or a bubble.
But if she’s unfit to drive, should she still be allowed to drive?
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To inform the thread, UK accident statistics from 2024 here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
Interesting to see the deep-dive on "younger car drivers", but not a pip about the old-age drivers. Yet we see from chart 1 that their casualty rate is far worse!
The shift from male to female is fascinating. In younger drivers accidents are disproportionately male, I guess due to high testosterone buffoonery but in older drivers it's disproportionately female. My personal observation is that older male drivers are much more slow and less confident whereas females tend to be overly confident and driving way too fast, especially the ones in huge cars.
According to this women become more dangerous than male 17-24 year old drivers only when they reach 80+ whereas for men they only become more dangerous than female 17-24 year old drivers at 86+.
I actually think more should be done about younger drivers than older.
> The shift from male to female is fascinating. In younger drivers accidents are disproportionately male, I guess due to high testosterone buffoonery but in older drivers it's disproportionately female.
When you correct for population size, I think you’ll see that difference largely, if not completely, goes away. There are more women than men in the UK from age 50 upwards (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-kingdom/2025/)
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One reason there are more females in accidents at the oldest ages is because the males are dead. In the UK, the average life expectancy for a female is 82.9 vs 77.9 for men, a 5-year gap.
>The shift from male to female is fascinating
Is that like a dog whistle for "perfectly in line with stereotypes"?
What I wanna see is how it maps vs wealth. Because I have a theory...
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In South Africa, all drivers are subject to an eye retest every 5 years, regardless of age. What the UK is doing seems pretty sane IMO.
US has token eye exams at the BMV. I've never seen or heard anyone fail.
During such a test that I could barely read anything, and afterwards realized I could not read most roadsigns--having relied too much on map apps. A visit to the eye doctor confirmed I shouldn't be driving, so I ordered glasses that same day.
Reporting unsafe drivers in my state is not anonymous. And at one point I had to tell a family member that if I found out they were still driving that I'd report them. (They had 3 accidents in 2 years, claiming it's all the computers in the cars.)
When i first got my driver's license in the US I almost failed my eye exam. They gave me 3 chances and I just barely passed on the third. This led to me finally getting glasses.
Some more context on the South African system, although before it was done at our equivalent to the DMV it now gets done by an optometrist.
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My mother completely stopped driving in her early 70s... thank god for the Swiss medical driving fitness test! (now at 75 instead of 70?) she was perfectly fine with it, online food order+delivery had become available, and her immediate neighbors were loving people helping her whenever I+siblings were not easily available.
Unfortunately what is needed are tests of driving ability. Most over-70s are significantly worse than the average driver and some are so dangerous they shouldn't be on the road at all.
Politically very difficult to take people's licences away though, especially when it's permanent, not their fault and it makes their life a lot worse.
It is unfortunate that things like this become politically impossible because older people are one of the most reliable voting groups out there.
I will always be bitter that older voters chose Brexit by a large margin, in opposition to the younger voters who will actually be around to feel its long term effects. Not taking that into account in voting feels wrong but there’s no politically palatable way of addressing it.
Didn't the UK just start allowing 16 year olds to vote, which presumably helps offset the impact of older voters? I remember not getting around to voting in my first election (USA, Colorado). The outcome was George W. Bush being elected president, who favored policies not well-liked by younger people at the time.
Give parents extra votes for their children who are not yet eligible to vote. Perhaps half a vote per child for starters.
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>It is unfortunate that things like this become politically impossible because older people are one of the most reliable voting groups out there.
They become politically impossible because they're not a front burner issue for anyone so the only people who are driving the issue are extremists who want the criteria set at like 10 whereas normal people want it at like 5 on some arbitrary scale of extremity so whenever it goes up for public consideration it gets shot down. You see this across all areas of mundane policy.
Make voting be based on military eligibility. This is something Starship Troopers was sort of correct about.
You can't be drafted in war time emergencies? You can't vote (also yes I do want women to be draftable)
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The worst age group behind the wheel is by far 16-25. The middle age group is the safest and the gap is actually moderate compared to 70-75.
You're taking about statistical averages but I'm talking about a significant minority of over-70s who are wildly dangerous. Most of them only stop driving when they cause an accident. Sometimes its a serious one.
There are already some measures for young people, like the 6 point thing. Maybe there could be more. Doesn't change the facts about dangerous OAP drivers
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Yes - I’ve seen the pricing algorithms at several large insurers. Massive surcharges for young people 16-25, rates level out 30-55, and then slowly start to go back up, but it’s a slow increase compared to the young ones.
> The worst age group behind the wheel is by far 16-25. The middle age group is the safest and the gap is actually moderate compared to 70-75.
Retest everyone's skill every 3-5 years (whenever up for driver card renewal).
AIUI, that's a misleading figure, because the elderly self-correct, in awareness of the greater difficulty, by driving a lot less, so the greater danger is masked in the per-unit-time accident rate.
So, in theory, policy could appropriately adjust for this dynamic by only requiring the test of over-70s driving more than X miles/year, but that adds hassle to enforcement.
Especially in the US. In countries with more robust public transport, you can get away with not having a car. That's basically impossible in the US.
As European, that has lived across multiple countries, that only applies to the lucky ones able to afford living close to the city center.
Also healthy enough to be able to walk stairs, as very few places care about people with disabilities, or carrying stuff that is a pain to transport across stairways.
People visit the touristic centre of the main cities and assume we all enjoy nice public transport systems.
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I’m an American and my vision, fully corrected, is right at the legal borderline to get a license without restrictions. I’ve never “failed” a vision exam at the DMV; one time the clerk even said, “good enough”. (Don’t worry, I never drive, I only keep my license up to date for serious emergencies).
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I know it doesn’t work everywhere, but I’m happy there are services like Uber and Lyft when I get older. I could see myself using those services a lot when I am no longer able to drive.
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Not impossible, with uber/lyft being available. And yes public transit is not good everywhere in the US, but in high density cities it generally is.
UK public transport is not good, especially when you get out of the major cities. Better than the US, but worse than Continental Europe.
The buses turn up when they feel like it, and there are problems with antisocial behaviour on a lot of them, including assault.
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Nope, even best countries in the world with great public transport like Switzerland have tons of remote places basically unreachable by public transport, or bus that goes 2x a day on some days of the week.
Guess what, mostly old folks live there and all this applies there. Its just not financially feasible to cover everybody. Proper full self driving should fix this, nothing less I am afraid.
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> Most over-70s are significantly worse than the average driver and some are so dangerous they shouldn't be on the road at all.
Evidence? I thought over-70s were on average safer than young drivers
UK statistics here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... The issue is that the rate of accidents rapidly increases after 70 and the easiest detectable indicator is deteriorating eyesight.
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https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/study-sheds-light...
I imagine there’s something of a bathtub curve where young (under 25) drivers have higher accident rates due to some combination of inexperience and immaturity, while older drivers (over 70) have higher accident rates due to disability creeping up on them without them noticing.
Seems that is true, at least for the ones currently on the road https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr...
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Agreed over 70s are safer than younger drivers, but consider young drivers in most jurisdictions face restrictions while elderly drivers do not.
Further I’d say anecdotally that past a certain point, certainly by 80s, elderly drivers are not accident free. It’s that they have an increasing number of small accidents until someone takes away the keys. If they do not have someone in their life to do that it’s probably reasonable that the government make that determination.
At some point the reduced vision and reflex speed makes them too hazardous on the road to others, even if they are driving slowly and carefully. Parking lot accidents, hitting kids, slamming the gas instead of the brakes, etc.
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I wouldn't say over 70 year olds, average 70 year old is fine. Problem gets a lot worse at 75 or 80. Most these people don't drive nearly as much as younger people anyway.
My grandma is 90 and drives 5 miles to the grocery store, a slow road. I don't think she'd pass a driving test but she drives during the day when barely anyone is on the road, chances of serious injury are nil.
Is it worth it to spend large amounts of money on testing these people, taking their license away if they fail? Getting rid of their car will force them to replace it with someone else driving or cycling which could be a problem in many places. Worst case scenario they'll need to go in a retirement home.
For my parents it was 65-70 when I noticed and started to become very concerned for their ability to drive safety. At 75 now, my dad at least only drives during broad daylight but even so he can't maintain a safe speed and does barely half the speed limit, then complains about tailgaters not liking his "retired lifestyle" (which is his personal excuse for driving slowly, when in reality he lacks the skill to keep up with traffic, which is very dangerous in my view...)
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Maybe less of an issue if they’re given taxi vouchers to the value of about the typical amount of driving they would have done?
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Well the obvious solution is take away the vote for over-65s!
/s … maybe
They do have less stake in the future and want short term policy payoffs...
Combine that with the initiatives of many a conservative or liberal political party to raise the retirement age beyond or up to 70 years.
Yeah, you have to work but you are not allowed to drive or vote any longer. Sounds fair.
It's not like voting does anything, anyway. Once elected, they do what they want.
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> Politically very difficult to take people's licences away though, especially when it's permanent, not their fault and it makes their life a lot worse.
It shouldn't be permanent. If they can improve, then why not? Maybe illness causes their poor driving and they find a treatment for that illness.
> If they can improve, then why not?
I'm talking about removing licences due to cognitive decline. It's not a temporary condition
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In my experience, the 70+ are bad at driving in ways that do lighter accidents. Typically: Drive 50 km/h everywhere, even if the road is 30 or 70. General weird behaviour. Swerving slowly left right left forever.
They do cause a lot of cursing, but they are signalling hard enough they're bad at driving and other drivers leave huge margins, overly grant right of way, don't cross the road, etc...
Fairly regularly an 80-something will end up driving down the wrong carriageway of a motorway or dual carriageway. Fairly regularly this results in deaths.
In Switzerland we do it all. After 75 there is requirement for periodic health check by doctor which consists of various mental checks and eyesight. I would put it at 70, everybody degrades with age at different pace, some lose it even before 50 (ie sclerosis or parkinson) but cca 70 is an age I can see clear mental decline in every person I ever interacted closely.
Wife is a GP and she regularly faces this at her work. I begged her numerous times to take away those licenses without mercy if the person is unfit, no amount of pleading, begging, crying of threats should change that. And they do it all, oh so much - to the point she is giving up this revenue stream, too much emotional burden (from somebody who sometimes has to tell patients they have ie cancer).
Why so harsh - we live in more rural place with tons of old folks. They are properly dangerous behind the wheel - they can't handle any sudden situation, heavy traffic is a challenge at best, they need to drive at absolute minimum speed at bright daylight to handle situations.
Its tough, they live their whole lives in the middle of nowhere, too stubborn to sell and move someplace more reasonable and without a car they can't easily take care of themselves in their remote places (but its 2026 we have ubers, taxis and home deliveries, and once further down the road good social housings for elderly). Often, they know old but still working doctors who turn the blind eye because they are old buddies and then its sometimes sad news.
When they handle 1.5 tonne of steel that accelerates fast and easily kills others, very easily it stops being primarily about them but about rest of society. When you see them barely managing driving around local primary school, its either them or us/our kids
Of course it makes their lives worse. In a lot of parts of the UK, the public transport is barely fit for purpose, irregular, non-existent (in much of the countryside) or dangerous (in the city). I speak from personal experience. I've been harassed and assaulted on British buses and trains on more than one occasion. Once had to phone the police to get rid of someone who started to follow me home, after he had hit me getting out of a train in a small branch station. It's like the Wild West. In one village I visited, there was only one bus there a day, and a bus back on a different day. How are old people supposed to function with that?
As usual this is set up as a tax farming scheme for the government to make money. They will make tonnes of money off forcing people to reapply for an overpriced licence every three years.
> As usual this is set up as a tax farming scheme for the government to make money. They will make tonnes of money off forcing people to reapply for an overpriced licence every three years.
This is zero-evidence bullshit. On and after the age of 70, all UK drivers have to renew their licence every three years anyway - it's been like that since 1976. This new change just adds a requirement to get an eye test (which the government doesn't "make money" from) as well, rather than self-certifying.
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This is good, no? The intent is obvious, it's likely improving the current situation, and I don't see any reason not to applaud it as an low-barrier incremental improvement.
driving in downtown Austin this morning, the waymo swarm is real. the US may not have robust public transit but why can't we subsidize ride shares for seniors who lose their ability to drive safely?
I’m still a couple decades off from “senior”, but I have already reached a point where most day to day driving feels like a chore. If/When Waymo finally arrives in my smallish Bay Area city I can see myself using it a quite a bit. Hopefully self-driving cars are ubiquitous by the time I reach “shouldn’t be driving” age.
When I lived in Charleston the transit system had both subsidized ride share and ADA-compliant ride services (literally a government taxi service) for seniors and the disabled. So it certainly can be done.
> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
Unless I've botched the math and/or what the internet tells me about the size of the characters on a UK number plate is wrong this seems to be a bit overboard.
The internet is telling me that the characters are 79mm tall and 50mm wide (except for '1' and 'I') with a 14mm stroke.
My eyes right now are about 250mm from my monitor. Something that is 79mm tall and 20m away would have the same angular size as something 250mm away that is 79mm / 20m x 250mm = 0.9875mm tall.
If I set the size to 75% in Chrome that is the size of the numbers on this page in the timestamps and the submission points and comment counts. It is about 1/2 the size of the numbers in the text box that I'm writing this comment in.
I've just taken a photo of that and will include a link to it to show how small that is [1]. In that I'm holding a ruler next to the left side of the text. The "180" up where it says "180 points" is what you have to be able to read to pass the test. (If you can't see the photo because Imgur blocks your country just grab a ruler, hold it vertically 25cm in front of you, and the apparent size of the space between the mm marks is the size character you need to read).
I have no idea what road signs and markings are like in the UK, but in the US in ~50 years of driving I don't think I've ever needed to read anything anywhere near that small.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/NGuPdfF
I'm sorry to say your conclusion doesn't hold. I'm not sure where exactly you went wrong, without trying to do the math my best guess would be that you just can't properly simulate a far-sight task in a near-sight environment like that. Our eyes don't work that way.
But if you go outside and do a real world test, you'll (hopefully) find that a number plate should be readable from much further away than 20 meters. If you don't, please go and see an optometrist! I'm serious.
20 m is actually a very lenient requirement IMO. In my country, one should be able to read a number plate from about 35 m easily, and with good eyesight, 65 m and more shouldn't be a problem.
Someone with 20:20 vision can read a UK number plate from about 60m so the 20m standard allows for some eye imperfections. You're allowed to use glasses.
I have some experience because I got a macular hole in one eye which had surgery. With the good eye I can do about 60m, with the problem one about 20.
if you're expecting a response from someone in the UK, use something other than imgur.com
As a neurologist that certifies driving ability in 80+ yo people, I would say vision is only one factor. Motor dexterity, fresh reflexes and mental capacity are equally or more important but they are not quantified.
> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
I would like to see better tests. I have a pet theory that visual perception deficiencies along the lines of simultanagnosia are considerably more common among older people than is generally recognized, and people with these conditions may be able to easily read letters and numbers at a distance but be unable to drive safely due to inability to reliably detect obstacles.
Visual screening is fairly easy and every bit as quick, but it needs different tests. Something along the lines of an Ishihara plate but with colors that are perceptible even to color blind people might work. Or a visually busy image with instructions to identify one or two particular objects in the scene.
A friend of mine who was cycling in his 60s got hit by a driver in his 80s, taking his regular route to church, but apparently not very observantly. The cyclist was thankfully able to recover.
Does any country have a good system? In Norway it used to be your doctor taking away your license. But that didn't turn out too well. People need to be able to tell their doctor about their issues without fear of "retaliation", and doing it would of course damage the relationship going forward.
So I'm all for doing it, too many old people that shouldn't be on the road, but unsure how.
How about stall this in courts until:
- Self driving vehicles are truly vs theoretically safer than humans or at least the average 70 year old.
- Self driving vehicles can be attained or reliably rented for an itsy bitsy teenie weenie fraction of a seniors monthly stipend or pension or disability. Reliably meaning no waiting line or shortages of rental self driving cars or vans.
https://archive.ph/yjDN0
It sould be every year. Over 70 shouldn’t drive in my opinion. I’m in my 50s and still believe this.
What I’m getting from this discussion is that maybe we should just make this universal, rather than picking an arbitrary age. Too onerous, perhaps, but under-70s definitely can experience serious decline in eyesight.
I think everyone should do a re-test every 10 years then maybe 5 years after 70.
There aren't enough driving testers for people to take a test once in their lives, let alone 8 times.
It would also be totally pointless between 20 and 60 at the very least. The vast majority of people don't have any cognitive decline before then.
People forget or don't keep up to date on rules. Some kind of retaking the theoretical parts would at least be nice. For instance the UK has a new highway code (I've heard), and most countries it's quite different to drive now than lets say 20 years ago. For instance the amount of cyclists and the rules around that I feel drivers in Norway have a bad grasp on.
And heck, when I got my license I lived in a remote town, 3 hours away from the nearest street light. Lots of things I got away with not learning, and whatever I memorized for the theoretical test 20 years ago is mostly forgotten. I think many people think they "know" the rules, but really don't
You also have the problem that the pass rate for tests has changed massively in the years since most 50 year olds took their tests in the UK. Anecdotally, it is not at all uncommon for young drivers to fail the test 3+ times (at least amoung the youngsters I know). 30 years ago it was rare to have to take the test more than 2x before passing.
That and the scandal of test slots being bought up months in advance by what are essentially touts, as well as the lack of testers you noted, make it unworkable.
There could be, it's just that we don't value testing highly enough and we're happy to see people killed and seriously injured by these things.
Hmm? Where I live you have to renew your license (basically pass a few medical exams) every 10 years since the day you get your first license. Why wait until 70?
I wonder if there are non optical visual tests, like cognitive ability to perceive multiple details at once.
Waymo is the answer to all our problems
Gonna suck to lose your license when you live in outer places like Roadhead, Carlisle. :(
Would you rather people who can’t see well enough continue to drive?
In Italy (and EU perhaps?) is every year from 70 onwards
How about testing people in a driving simulator?
Let's examine this:
> Nearly one in four car drivers killed in 2024 were aged 70 or older, according to government figures.
So, somewhat less than 25%. Let's guess 23% or whatever.
What are the age demographics? According to 2024 stats, 19.7% of the UK was aged 65 or older. 17% in the 0-14 age range.
Thus 65-year-olds and older make up 23.7% of the population older than 14.
It seems, roughly, as if the proportion of 70-year-olds and older might be more or less in line with their representation in the driving age population.
It's not the statistics we need, but close enough to defeat the alarmist idea of OMG, a whopping quarter (almost) fatalities are 70+; get the old buggers off the roads!
That's not a good counter. I think you need to look at how many of that demographic actually drives, not how big the demographic is. Or maybe kilometers driven per accident.
That onus is on the article: convince me that almost a quarter of the facilities being 70+ means something (s not explained by statistics but follows age).
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Why pick on the over-70s though? Most drivers in the UK either can't see or don't bother looking, so we should be demanding higher standards of all drivers.
They won't test everyone on a regular basis due to the cost and because it would be politically unpopular. Heck, I saw someone in their 30's go ballistic about losing their license after having two seizures while driving (both of which resulted in collisions).
Enforcement is another issue. I don't even bother reporting being hit by cars anymore because the police refuse to do anything about it. That is after an incident and with a plate number. Enforcement of people driving without a license would be next to impossible unless there is an incident.
As for "don't bother looking", well, you cannot really test for that since it is usually the result of some form of distracted driving or carelessness. Both of which are unlikely to show up when someone knows they are being assessed.