Proposals are being made by police in Scotland potentially banning people from driving if they are considered to be too old, or if they suffer from medical conditions in a bid to make the roads safer.
Senior officers claim the roads could be made safer if drivers with conditions were made to surrender their licences if ruled unfit to drive following an assessment.
Currently, licence holders are required to inform the DVLA about several conditions, such as epilepsy, sleep apnoea, diabetes and glaucoma, and are obligated to concede their licence if a doctor rules it no longer safe for them to be behind the wheel. These proposals question whether these laws extend far enough.
Chief Inspector Logue said Police Scotland might need to be more aware and proactive about stopping those who they believe are impaired from driving. In response to several cases of road fatalities she made the following statement: “We need a new, innovative way to deal with this and we are working on this at a command level. A lot of people killed on our roads are down to driver error or unfitness to drive. This may be down to medical issues.”
Although the proposals aim at progressing the desired goal of eliminating road accident deaths, the limitation of people’s freedom and flexibility through driving needs to be treated with the sensitivity it deserves.
Road safety charity Brake supports the idea urging the UK government to introduce compulsory eyesight tests for road users after a survey discovered 1.5m drivers in the UK had never had their eyes tested, despite research showing 2,900 casualties were caused by poor eyesight each year.
This appears to be the issue with road fatalities – people are unable to objectively assess whether they their abilities truthfully enable the to perform driving functions. Even if sensible evaluation can be made how many people would voluntary surrender their licences, sometimes their only method of connecting them to work, friends or family?
Mccarthy’s, as specialists in road traffic claims, handle a significant number of cases where impairments are ruled as the source of the incident and, as such, reform in regulating when a party is forced surrender their licence may reduce these incidents.
Age Scotland are concerned that proposals risk unfairly targeting the wrong category of motorist, with the ‘caricature’ of ‘bad’ older drivers meaning that road safety may be used as justification to limited later in life drivers.
However, simply targeting a particular group, such as the elderly, does not appear to be solution to this issue. Research by the RAC Foundation suggests drivers over the age of 75 make up 6% of licence holders, but account for only 4.3% of deaths and serious injuries. In comparison, drivers aged 16-20 makes up just 2.5% of road users, but 13% of those killed and seriously injured.
The AA agreed that it would be wrong to generalise about older motorists. A spokesman said: “With drivers it’s difficult to do a broad brushstroke”.
This comment possibly offers the key to the successful implementation of the proposals: assess the ability of the individual and not the broad demographic they belong to.
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