We may soon have 70 million boomers too old to drive, too car-dependent to stop.

As the baby boomer bubble pushes into its eighties, we are driving into a demographic wall.

In March 2024, Mary Fong Lau, 78 years old at the time, drove her Mercedes SUV at 72MPH into a bus shelter, killing a family of four. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, she told someone at the scene that she had tried to brake but “accidentally moved (her) foot onto the gas pedal.” She apparently will not go to jail because she is old, and it would be “sentencing her to die within the state prison system.” And hey, while she is accused of moving millions of dollars and various properties she owns to third parties to avoid financial penalties, she does apparently feel remorse.

Addison Del Mastro raises all the usual urbanist questions in his post discussing the psychology of motordom and its consequences:

“So the case sits somewhere within that moral haze of people who aren’t fit to drive, still driving because it’s effectively impossible to give up driving, given the way we have designed our country. You can view this as obviating any guilt except in extreme cases. Or you can view it as living in a system which may, and often does, compel all of us to eventually visit potentially deadly violence on someone else.”

He raises “the question of what exactly people in a largely car-dependent country are supposed to do with themselves as they age out of driving responsibly.” It is a problem we all have to face as the big baby boomer bubble pushes into their eighties. It is going to be a huge issue; I know, because I have seen this movie before.

My late father joked that he didn’t want to live to be eighty because he would have to take a driving test that he knew he would fail. He was not alone in thinking that he would rather die than lose his driver's license. Unfortunately, he got his wish, and a few years later, the Conservative premier of Ontario, pandering to the seniors’ vote, changed the rules so that only a vision test and a five-minute cognitive screening exercise were required to keep your licence.

That meant my mother could keep driving her little Toyota Echo into her 90s, finally losing her licence when she lost control and scraped the sides of a few fancy BMWs and Mercedes (she lived in a wealthy part of town) She spent the next year hiring instructors, who all fled after a few minutes, and then failing the driving exam spectacularly- the examiner just made her stop the car, and I had to go pick her up. She was distraught and felt that she had lost her freedom, even though she lived on a streetcar line a few blocks from the subway- there are few places in Toronto that are less car-dependent, and I could literally push her in a wheelchair from her apartment to her doctor’s office.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, was trapped in her suburban side-split. When she got sick, she refused to sell her Saturn because she was certain that she would drive again. Meanwhile, spouse Kelly had to drive out to her house in the suburbs to take her to the store or the doctor; she couldn’t do anything on her own. I wrote about how this was the shape of things to come on Treehugger a dozen years ago in It Won’t Be Pretty When Boomers Lose Their Cars:

“The oldest boomers are now just 68. But there are 78 million of them, and as they get older, the impact on suburbia will be profound. More and more of municipalities' taxes will be going to support them instead of schools and parks — Why? Because they vote a lot — while property values, and the tax base will decline as whole neighborhoods turn into senior citizens districts, with old Saturns rusting in the driveway like at my mother-in-law’s house. Transit costs will go through the roof as seniors demand services in low-density areas that cannot support it. The fact is, there is a major urban planning disaster staring us all in the face, which is going to seriously hit everyone young and old in about 10 years when the oldest boomers are 78. We have to prepare for it now.”

And here we are, and the oldest boomers are pushing 80, nobody is prepared, and we still have a demographic disaster staring us in the face. We have to recognize the physical problems that come with aging, making driving difficult and dangerous; I suffer from a few of them.

Vision is the big one; it deteriorates significantly as you age, especially at night. Peripheral vision shrinks. Medication has side effects; many over-the-counter drugs warn “do not operate heavy machinery,” yet that is what a car is. Reaction times can be four times as long as those of young people. Physical ability, dexterity and strength deteriorate; it is not surprising that people like Mary Fong Lau say they mixed up the pedals. We physically shrink- Mary Fong Lau probably could barely see over the hood of that Mercedes GLK-Series SUV.

Then there is the design of the roads. Sara Joy Proppe wrote in Strong Towns about what happens when you can’t drive and in much of North America, you can’t even walk:

“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.”

Mary Fong Lau didn’t have to drive. She is rich; She lives in San Francisco, where they have sidewalks. She could call an Uber or even a Waymo driverless car. One wonders whether she or the road design engineers should go to jail; I think the politicians who pander to drivers also bear some of the responsibility.

• Instead of raising speed limits and removing cameras as they do where I live in Ontario, Canada, they could take measures such as speed tables and other road design features that make it more difficult to speed. (Safety changes were proposed after the crash in San Francisco, but have been canned because local merchants complained.)

• Instead of making it easier to drive longer in unsafe vehicles, they could bring back mandatory driver testing and regular car inspections.

• Giant SUVs are essentially light trucks and require more skill to drive than conventional cars. There should be a separate licence category requiring appropriate driving tests.

• Intelligent Speed Assistance (AKA speed limiters), which stops people from driving over the speed limit, might be radioactive among the general driving population, but there is a case to be made that it would keep older drivers from going 70MPH into bus shelters and day care centres. (A speed-limiter bill was proposed for California, but Gavin Newsom killed it.) Why not make ISA mandatory for everyone over 70?

• Instead of fighting bike lanes because, as many politicians say, “seniors need to be able to drive and park at their doctors,” we should be investing in micromobility lanes so there is a safe place for e-bikes and e-trikes. These work in suburbs and cities for people of all ages.

• And of course, instead of protecting single-family zoning, we need more affordable, accessible housing in walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods with good transit.

I keep going back to David Foot, who wrote that “demographics can explain two-thirds of everything.” It is inevitable: Take 70 million aging baby boomers and put them in big SUVs and pickup trucks on North American roads, and you have a whole lot of accidents waiting to happen.

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