Senior Drivers: Safer Than Ever

Heres a statistic that may shock you; someone in America is turning 62 every 8 seconds and this is projected to hold true for the next 19 years.

The Baby Boomers are turning grey in incredible numbers and many road safety experts expected a subsequent rise in senior car accidents, thinking that many would drive past the age where it was safe to do so.

Instead, according to a recent study at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit educational organization, the opposite has happened the rate of senior car accidents has actually gone down in the last decade, despite the fact that the older generation is holding onto their licenses longer and driving at more advanced ages.

Among drivers 70 years old and older, the total number of car accidents dropped 37 percent. For drivers 80 and older, the decline was even more dramatic there were almost half as many accidents as in the previous decade. In contrast, the car accident rate for drivers 35-54 dropped only 23 percent.

Back in 2001, IIHS researchers expected radically different results from this kind of study that, because of the growing senior population, there would be more of a risk of car accidents in that age group. Thats why they were so taken aback by this studys findings.

If the crash trends of drivers 70 and older had mirrored the experience of middle-age drivers, we estimate that about 10,000 additional older drivers would have been in fatal crashes during 1997-2008, says Anne McCartt, Institute Senior Vice President for Research and one of the authors of the new report.

Why the discrepancy? While theres no hard evidence to suggest why seniors are driving more safely, the Institute believes it may be because theyre policing themselves more wisely. The ones who need to either limit or stop their driving altogether, may be doing it on their own. There are also many new state licensing policies that are stricter on checking the abilities of the elderly.

The other good news? The odds of an older person surviving a crash have also improved. Researchers calculated that a driver 70 and older is around three times as likely as someone 35-54 years old to sustain a fatal personal injury in a car accident. Again, this was another unexpected statistic to the authors of the study who expected much more negative news in terms of personal injury and wrongful death in senior car accidents.