Jan 27, 2016 4 min read

First, please forgive us for repeating ourselves, but when a serious problem goes unresolved and has the potential to get even worse, we feel compelled to speak out about it until there is some acceptable solution.

The issue is this: People of advanced age who really have no business doing so are getting behind the wheels of cars and causing accidents – sometimes deadly accidents – and those who could take action to make us safer, namely our state legislators, are failing to do so.

There is no shortage of examples of this type of accident. They seem to happen on a weekly basis somewhere in our region.

The most recent came last week when an 84-year-old Pittsburgh woman who became confused about which of the pedals would cause her car to stop, instead punched the accelerator. She plowed over a landscape barrier and lurched onto Route 19 in Peters Township. The toll of wrecked vehicles was five. It was sheer luck that no one was seriously injured or killed.

The woman who caused this wreck was no doubt sorry and mortified about it, but that’s little solace for the folks whose vehicles she damaged. It would have been much preferable to have prevented this accident, and the others like it, from happening, but there’s really no effective apparatus to do so.

At present, the best we can hope for is that a family member recognizes that their father or mother or grandfather or grandmother is a menace to others, and gets the keys away from them.

But we suspect that many avoid this, some because they are averse to a potential confrontation, and perhaps others because they don’t want to be left having to provide regular transportation for the person whom they have “unkeyed.” Doctors also have the ability to report patients who they believe should no longer be driving, but we question how often that happens.

We’ve heard before that taking away senior citizens’ ability to drive also takes away their “freedom,” and that’s no doubt true to some degree. But driving is not a right, and people most certainly do not have a right to operate a motor vehicle when they can no longer effectively differentiate between the pedal that makes a car come to a halt and the one that causes it to move.

Those who rush to defend older drivers often argue that young people are worse. That’s a red herring, and as we’ve noted before, a major difference between young drivers and elderly drivers is that most of the youngsters will get better and safer behind the wheel, while the senior drivers typically will not.

Here in the newsroom, if we hear on the police scanner that a driver is going the wrong way on a road or has plowed over an embankment and into a house, we can be fairly certain that it’s 1) a drunk; 2) someone fleeing police; or 3) an elderly driver. There are plenty of laws governing the actions of the first two, and they are stringently applied, but very often the senior drivers aren’t held accountable for their misadventures. No charges. It’s simply chalked up to being “an accident.” But it’s really no accident when someone who is past the point of being able to safely operate a motor vehicle chooses to do so anyway. It’s an accident waiting to happen.

Pennsylvania has one of the oldest populations in the nation. This is not an issue that is going away. It’s well past time for our lawmakers to put in place a system of retesting – both vision and a road test – for people past a certain age. But we’ll not get our hopes up for quick action. As we know, older people tend to go to the polls on a regular basis, and most of our legislators are up for re-election this year.

Some 75-year-olds are more than capable of driving safely, but many are not. We need to start finding out who can and who can’t.