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Aging and Driving

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Encyclopedia of Geropsychology

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Motor vehicular transport in later life

Definition

Motorists 65 and older show an increased risk of fatal crashes when turning across traffic. Age-related declines in dual-task processing play an important part in this effect. Several solutions are suggested to mitigate the increased crash risk.

Operating an automobile is the single riskiest activity that most readers of this entry engage in on a regular basis. For example, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of accidental injury deaths in the United States and are the leading cause of all deaths for people between the ages 1–33 and 56–71 (NSC 2010). Driving is a complex skill that takes years to master. Support for this assertion is provided in Fig. 1, in which are plotted fatal crash rates for different age drivers normalized by million miles driven (FARS 2015; IIHS 2015). In the figure, fatal crash rates steadily decline from novice/teen drivers until crash rates asymptote around 30 years of age. Around age 65,...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    David L. Strayer

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  1. David L. Strayer
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Correspondence to David L. Strayer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Nancy A. Pachana

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore

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Strayer, D.L. (2016). Aging and Driving. In: Pachana, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geropsychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_213-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_213-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-287-080-3

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