If all elderly drivers were tested, my son would still be alive
‘OH NO, not again!’ I thought when I saw the headline High Street Horror, after an 89-year-old driver going the wrong way down a busy street ploughed into shoppers. With people living longer than the three score years and ten, this will happen more frequently unless a medical assessment is made compulsory when renewing a driver’s licence when over 80. The majority of people who have been driving for 60 years or more are probably the safest on the road, but unfortunately there are some, citing how a car gives them independence and is a necessary part of their lives, who do not recognise or refuse to accept that they should give up their car keys. But these days roads are so much busier and roadworks and diversions can be confusing for drivers of any age, andd of course there are one-way streets. My 28-year-old son, Neil, was killed by an 89-year-old driver coming the wrong way down a dual-carriageway. The elderly motorist was blind in one eye and below the legal limit in the other but he still thought he was fit to drive. Yet when the subject of elderly drivers is raised, the statistics always come into it — about how young, inexperienced drivers cause the most accidents. Yes, that is probably true, and I honestly don’t know what can be done to help that situation — which is a separate one that ought to be tackled, too. But I do know what can be done at the other end of the spectrum: a medical assessment of one’s mental fitness to get behind the wheel of a lethal weapon (because that is what a car is).is In my area, Rob Heard of the Hampshire Constabulary runs an Elderly Drivers’ Awareness Week every September and goes around the county inviting older drivers to come along and see what can be done to keep them safe on the road. Many people take advantage of this and are all too ready and willing to stay safe on the road, as much for their own sake as for other people’s. It is too late for my son, but how many others — and this includes innocent pedestrians — are going to be injured? This is going to happen time and again until the powers-that-be are brave enough to bring in legislation and do something about it.
PATRICIA COLQUHOUN, Hartley Wintney, Hants.