More road to travel by: Implications for mobility and safety in late life

The ‘suburbanization’ of the United States is now generating a cohort of older adults who live where driving is most often the sole means of transport to all of the external necessities and conveniences of daily life. As suburbs grow further out from cities so the distances to be driven by future cohorts of older drivers will increase beyond those of today. Much research on driving in late life has focused on assessing the competence of older adults as drivers. Now more work is needed on technological solutions to maintaining this cohort’s driving mobility and safety. The presentation reviews recent changes in transportation technology (such as airbags), considers lessons learned from them in terms of their effects on older drivers and passengers and considers whether current knowledge of older drivers and their driving patterns offers guidance to the design of future technology.