“And she'll have fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-Bird away”
— From the 1964 song Fun Fun Fun written by Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Mike Love
Remember how it felt the day you traded in your learner’s permit for a full-fledged driver’s licence? The glint of silver as you twisted the key until it nestled into the ignition with a heart-stopping click? The purr and rumble of the motor engaging?
Suddenly, all pistons and cylinders — yours and the car’s — were firing. You adjusted your seating for maximum vision through what passed for a windshield back then. Cranking your window down, maybe a soft spring breeze wafted in, mingling with the smell of circa-1964 vinyl. You backed out of the driveway, your blood carbonating, careful not to run over your kid sister’s bike. The road ahead was broad and uncluttered. What were you — 17? With a couple of tonnes of rolling steel and the harnessed power of, say, 100 horses at your command? The possibilities were so vast, you didn’t yet have a vocabulary for naming them.
Boy, were we a lucky generation. Among many other gifts we were allotted, we were the first to go mobile, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, well before our brains had completely formed, or our rampaging ids were held in check. Access to the wheel of a car meant freedom. Freedom, as in freedom from — from parents, from restrictions, from childhood itself.
Now, skip ahead 40 or 50 years. The car is so ubiquitous, it has become a kind of bionic appendage, hardwired into our systems — as second nature to our well-being as our ears or our eyes. For many people, driving is no longer fun. It’s a necessity. It still represents freedom, though — freedom to. Freedom to get to an important appointment or to visit a friend at the other end of the city. Freedom to get out and buy that bargain offered at a far-off big-box store. If some kind of government daddy wants to take away our cars now, just let him try.
You’re not going to want to hear this, but a few of us should seriously consider voluntarily giving them up. It’s one of the indignities of aging that our senses — and therefore our bionic appendages — start to fail us. When they do, we have less and less business on the road.
A StatsCan document issued last year had some truly frightening figures to share. As of 2009, when the study was performed, 3.25 million people aged 65 and over — or three-quarters of all seniors — had a driver’s licence. Of that number, about 200,000 were 85 or older.
The good news: “[T]he vast majority of seniors who had a driver’s licence had good or very good visual and auditory capacities and cognitive abilities,” the study reported.
Ready for the bad news? Some 53 per cent of seniors who said they had “serious hearing problems” still had a driver’s licence. What’s more, 25,000 of those legally licensed folk appeared to be actively driving. Even scarier: “Among seniors who did not see well enough to read the newspaper or to recognize a friend on the other side of the street, even with glasses, 19 per cent, or 13,600, had a licence. About half of this group had driven a vehicle in the previous month,” the study states.
It gets worse: In 2009, about 20,000 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia had a driver’s licence. Of these seniors, 14,600 had driven in the month just before the survey was taken.
No equivalent to a breathalyzer exists to test geezers behind the wheel. No law on the books bans driving while old. Nor should there be one. That said, common sense ought to prevail while we still have our wits about us, perhaps in the form of a codicil to our living wills.
Come the day when I can’t read a newspaper — even with my glasses on — take my car keys, please. If I can’t hear or my mind wanders away from the semi in front of me, back to the time when I first pressed the gas pedal and sailed away, confiscate ’em on site.
Follow Rosa Harris on Twitter: @rharrisa
