Age Limitations on Driving
Well to start this off, I have a grandfather who is 70 years old. He likes to get out of the house and is still in great shape for his age. He has no health issues but you can tell that his hearing and some of his sight is fading. He loves cars and has a couple of antique vehicles. Well one day he left the house took one of his old antique cars out for a drive. He ended up calling my grandmother four hours after he had left. It turns out that he had got into an accident. The other driver was new and had ran a red light slamming into the passenger side of my grandfathers car. By the end of the whole mess my grandfather ended up having to pay a ridiculous fine because the other driver put the blame on him, and there wasn't anyone around to see what had happened to defend him. Even though he didn't do anything wrong he got the blame and most likely because he was too old to be driving and that it was easy to believe that an old man would not end up seeing a red light and run through it.
So really I think that the answer to this question "How old is too old to drive?" is that there is no age that you can say is a limit. You have all kinds of people like my grandfather doing great for their age and still able to drive like the most of us (if not better), but on the other hand you have the elderly who are sick or have lost most of their hearing or sight. It really depends on the person to determine if their driving days are done. Now granted the elderly lose hearing with age, sight, and also some reaction time might be lost as well, but it still depends on the person. It's not just the elderly who are causing accidents. If anything they should be better drivers then the rest of us because they have been driving for so long.
One of the biggest problems that we have on the roads are the younger more ignorant drivers. The biggest problem is drinking and driving and how many DUI incidents have you heard of where the person was over 40? Not too many I'd say, or at least I haven't. The elderly have been around long enough to know not to do stupid things on the roads and therefore they don't do anything that is unsafe out there.
So if anything the reality is that we are just picking on the elderly because we think that we have power over them. They are just as equally responsible for the problems on the roads. You can't put an age to this problem you really have to test the person individually because everyone ages differently.
