How will we live when we reach the end of our drivespan?

Our cities and suburbs are not designed to cope with the demographic time bomb.

You can only do this for so long. Credit:Mick Tinbergen / Wikimedia Commons /

I recently discovered a wonderful post by journalist Stephanie Nakhleh titled The Death House, explaining why so many people plan to leave their homes feet first. “Somehow, weirdly, the single-family home has morphed from a place to raise kids into a place to die. It has become the death house.” She even quotes me in it, which is much appreciated.

We have a lifespan, a healthspan, and we have to accept that we have a drivespan.

I have often written about the problem of older people being stuck in what I will now call “death houses” after they lose the ability to drive, and this spring I was working on an article about it for a major publication. I could not complete the article for personal reasons, but I published the first part, introducing the concept of drivespan and discussing testing here last week, and inspired by Stephanie, I publish the balance of it here.

Part II: The question isn’t “how do I age in place”; it’s “How do I get out of this place?”

That’s my late mother-in-law’s house in a Toronto suburb. I thought it was a brilliant plan- a tight, efficient sidesplit on a lovely cul-de-sac. Spouse Kelly says it was a great place to grow up. Joyce did not want to leave, but once she reached the end of her drivespan, Kelly had to go out there regularly and take her shopping and to the bank and to the doctor. Eventually she reached the end of her healthspan, and had to pick which floor to live on- the middle one with the kitchen or the upper one with the bathroom. Kelly was driving out daily. Finally, Joyce moved out far too late, and her lifespan ended a few months later.

We don’t talk enough about drivespan. Daniel Foley’s 2002 study, Driving Life Expectancy of Persons Aged 70 Years and Older in the United States concluded that drivers over 70 can expect to drive for eleven more years, and then men will likely be dependent on alternatives for seven years, women for ten. Nobody is planning for this gap.

Some people plan for “aging in place” by moving to houses with single-floor living, exacerbating the problem by developing “bungalow leg”, a British term for the weakening of leg muscles that comes from living without the challenge of stairs. Others move to retirement communities where the houses have giant garages to accommodate vans, but have Walkscores of zero.

Another survey confirms that boomers are clueless

I got in so much trouble writing about an AARP study, Building for the Future: Creating Homes and Communities for Aging Well, and calling boomers clueless, but 72% of Americans want to stay in their own home forever and are expecting to make bathroom and other modifications to make it easier and safer. Meanwhile, there is no mention at all about the most significant and dramatic change in their lives: the ability to drive.

This is in a country where, according to HUD and census data, 73% of Americans live in suburban and rural communities, where it is difficult to live without a car. The problem isn’t going to be “How do I age in place?”; it is going to be “How do I get out of this place?”

Almost nobody is thinking about this. According to a University of Michigan study, “less than half of these older drivers have made a plan for a time down the road, when changes in their health might make it less safe for them to drive. Even fewer know they could create a formal plan for stepping away from the driver’s seat when the time comes. And very few have talked with a health care provider about driving as it relates to their health.”

Nobody thinks it is going to happen to them

The ability to drive goes before the ability to walk.

A lot of baby boomers are fit and active these days, but as Camilla Cavendish noted in the Financial Times, there are different kinds of old.

“The ‘Young-Old’ are very active and healthy and productive — totally different from 30 years ago,” says Professor Takao Suzuki, professor of gerontology at Tokyo’s JF Oberlin University, who defines Young-Old as 60 to 75 — or older. “The World Health Organization defines ‘old’ as 65, but as gerontologists, our main concern is with the ‘Old-Old’, who are very different.” – These are our leading-edge baby boomers.

The young-old feel even younger than they are; a British survey found that “Eight in 10 said they feel mentally younger than their actual age and 56% feel physically younger. “60-year-olds typically think their mental age is 42.” These unrealistic assessments of our own capabilities set us up for failure when the problems of being old-old catch up with us.

A 2020 study, Older Adults’ Expectations about Mortality, Driving Life and Years Left without Driving, notes the problems that occur when people are forced to stop driving: “those who engage in driving reduction and cessation experience not only mobility loss, but numerous adverse health outcomes, including higher prevalence of depression, decreased functional outcome, earlier admission into institutional care, and even mortality.”

However, they often don’t have a choice:

“Across the United States, older adults’ tendencies toward continuing to drive are reinforced by the lack of transportation options available to supplement or replace driving. Drivers in smaller cities, suburban settings, or rural areas have limited access to mass transportation and providing alternative transportation options presents greater challenges.”

And they don’t like buses.

“Throughout most of the U.S., most older drivers prefer to drive themselves or be transported in a personal vehicle, even when public transportation is available. As a result, driving is synonymous with personal transportation mobility, and driving cessation is associated with loss of independence combined with becoming a burden to family and friends.”

Our cities and suburbs are not designed for this

We don’t have the kind of housing we need. According to The Forgotten Middle: Many Middle-Income Seniors Will Have Insufficient Resources For Housing And Health Care:

“We project that by 2029, there will be 14.4 million middle-income seniors, 60 percent of whom will have mobility limitations and 20 percent of whom will have high health care and functional needs. While many of these seniors will likely need the level of care provided in seniors housing, we project that 54 percent of seniors will not have sufficient financial resources to pay for it.”

Sara Joy Proppe wrote in Strong Towns:

“By designing our cities for cars, and consequently neglecting our sidewalks, we have siloed our elders in several ways. Not only does an inability to drive confine many seniors to their homes, but corresponding busy roads and inhumane streetscapes add to the isolating effect by also limiting walkability.”

Rachel Quednau also writes in Strong Towns about how to solve this:

· Make cities safe and easy to get around without a car.

Quenau calls for slowing down cars, but we also need serious implementation of Vision Zero, better walking infrastructure and maintenance. We need much wider sidewalks and separate, wider lanes for bikes and the new age of electric mobility.

· Create housing options that work for people of all ages and abilities.

Most cities in North America have a zoning monoculture, pretty much prohibiting anything but single-family dwellings, setting minimum house sizes, banning backyard housing and tiny homes. But if people are going to be able to stay in their neighbourhoods, we’ll need a variety of housing types.

· Build communities that give people purpose and meaning.

This is really the natural result of 1 and 2; instead of being trapped in the house in front of the TV, people can get out, go to a library or a club, or walk to a store. As Quenau concludes, “By building our cities at a walkable, human scale, with different housing options and stores, gathering places and resources nearby, we create a foundation for people from ages 1-100 to live happy, healthy lives now and in the future.”

But this isn’t happening; as Matthew Lewis of California NIMBY notes,

“What makes this a crisis rather than just a planning problem is that the very people who are going to be most harmed by car-dependent land use are the ones who have spent decades fighting any alternative to it. Go to any city council meeting about housing, any public protest about a bike lane or a transit line, and you will see the same cohort every single time. I know public meetings are a terrible measure of a population’s actual preferences — the people who show up tend to be richer and whiter than the population at large. But the pattern is so consistent it’s hard to dismiss.”

Will self-driving cars save older adults from being stuck in the suburbs?

Self-driving cars won’t save us

Every time I write about this subject, people tell me that autonomous vehicles are the answer. AARP has studied this and concluded that older adults will miss out on this so-called mobility revolution.

“Those who have more limitations (physical, cognitive, multiple disabilities, financial, technology access/understanding) or certain specific needs (transportation that accommodates mobility aids, low-income, rural location) often do not fit into current new mobility business models.”

Conclusion: You can’t argue with demographics

When you mash the demographic data from the Census with the drivespan projections from Foley and Vivoda, you get a 20-year rolling wave starting about now, when the oldest boomers are turning 80. Medication loads are increasing, as is MCI, and along with the proprioception and the possible five-fold increase in crashes. This is the first crisis on the roads.

The second crisis intensifies when the oldest boomers reach 83 in 2029, and the leading-edge boomers enter the old-old stage, when they can no longer drive. By the early 2030s there may well be between 8 and 12 million Americans living in car-dependent communities who are past their drivespan. That’s more than the population of New York City, except New Yorkers have subways and Citibikes.

What we have to do now:

Testing reform

I covered this in my last post.

Vehicle design

Consumer Reports, AARP, and Progressive all recommend that older drivers get SUVS. “Based on safety studies, SUVs are generally better for older drivers than cars. Vehicle weight and size are important factors in predicting survival in a crash.” Yet the IIHS found that SUVs are about 45% more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars. We should worry more about the people outside of the cars. It would also make sense to make Intelligent Speed Assistance (the new smart speed limiters) mandatory.

Walkable communities, transit, micromobility lanes

Matthew Lewis concludes:

“The solutions exist and we know what they are. We need dramatically more infill housing — with elevators, because elevator reform is the new zoning reform — in walkable areas, so that people have somewhere to go when they can no longer drive. We need to make driving more expensive and more difficult past a certain age through insurance and relicensing requirements. You can’t just do one of those things. Building the housing without changing the incentives won’t work, because too many people in this cohort are so set in their ways that they will refuse to leave their four-bedroom suburban houses, regardless. You have to make the housing cheaper in walkable areas and make the driving more expensive and harder to do simultaneously.”

The demographic reality is inescapable: We are going to have millions more older drivers with diminishing capabilities, in cars that are too big and too dangerous to everyone around them, in cities and suburbs where it is too easy to drive too fast, where there are few satisfactory alternatives to driving, governed by politicians who don’t have the nerve to do anything about it. It will not end well.