Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Driving licence at risk..?

We have had several fatal RTA’s in our area recently caused by elderly drivers who are no longer competent to drive but refuse to hand in their keys resulting in tragedy.

Most of us in this age group manage okay, but it is a national problem that can’t just be ignored.

Clipper ... I agree ... there needs to be some testing of eyedight and cognitive ability after a certain age ... quite how it's done will be the issue ... I wonder if there's some tech solution like the insurance 'black-boxes' used to monitor young drivers to get cheaper premiums ... perhaps over a certain age those could be compulsory and a shortfall in performance would trigger a human assessment.

The fatal accidents involving reckless young drivers can't be ignored either, but somehow it is. Perhaps everyone under 25 should have a monitor in the car .... poor youthful judgement and impulse control is as big an issue as the failures of the ageing process.

K

I can't imagine doing less than 15k a year in the plus8, even when I don't need to. Mind you, I've only just qualified for a senior railcard😂

Yes, George,that's how I spotted it. The news feed showed it as from GB News

That reminds me of the ex factory "Telematics" socket provided on the wiring loom of my new Royal Enfield motorbike. These are now made in India and seemingly fitted to all the bikes they currently produce (a million last year). It's fed with the same set of connections as the OBD2 socket, although of different shape, and so carries CANBUS high and low lines in turn providing the full range of monitored data. I can only imagine it's for the black box recorder device you mention favoured by some insurance companies I understand. Maybe there is a requirement in India for such to be available since I've not seen them elsewhere.

This is exactly how purveyors of Rage Bait like GB News, Daily Mail, Daily Express et al work. They'll find something, possibly something actually quite sensible, that someone has said, and spin it into something specifically designed to get people frothing at the mouth.

So "As you get older, it might be sensible to look at alternatives to driving in view of the costs and risks." becomes "The Wokerati are going to take your driving licenses away if you're old."

They get pretty desperate at times when confronted with undeniably good things that have been done by somebody with whom they are ideologically opposed, like the news from the government that they've deported 16,500 illegal immigrants in the first 6 months since they've come to power.

Reponses have been along the lines of "Yebbut some of them were voluntary" as if somehow somebody recognising they are in the country illegally and agreeing to go home is a failure, or "Yebbut there's loads of them and this is barely a scratch" as if the government are going to stop now instead of ramping up the deportations now they've starting to get a grip on the situation.

TBM has noted in the past how they teach kids critical thinking through the SMART acronym (Source, Motivation, Audience, Reaction, Testable) which I think is a flipping good principle to apply to anything one sees. Who is this person? Why are they telling me this? Why have they identified me to tell? What do they want me to think? How do I know it's true?

Young drivers can have a Black Box fitted by insurance companies, they get cheaper insurance. The black Box monitors their driving, excess speed sudden braking etc.

Any driver aged over 70 who is involved in any incident to blame or not is subject to a mandatory roadside eye site test. If they fail their licence will be revoked within an hour.

The UK has amongst the lowest fatality rate on the planet .... most of those lower are island microstates with few cars ... like most things in life chasing that last little bit becomes harder and harder ... you do have to wonder what draconian and impractical methods it might take to get significantly lower?


https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/road-traffic-accidents/by-country/

K

Interestingly Australia is about twice as high, New Zealand three times and the US 4 times.

Exactly. It all seems a bit diversionary to me. How about doing something about improving driver training rather than applying further constraints? They could easily get the necessary income by dropping the £52k cap on earnings-related speeding fines. Why should the wealthy get away with proportionately lower speeding fines than the rest of us?

Been my argument for years, but as an IAM motorcyclist (even though I no longer have a bike) that is to be expected. I still try to apply all that I learned and periodically re-read the highway code and "Roadcraft".