COLLISION COURSE:
Older Drivers in New Jersey

Concluding article in a series of articles on elderly drivers:

Anne Lampasona, 72, no longer drives during peak hours.

Al Siebern, 69, recognizing his peripheral vision isn't as sharp as it was when he was younger, looks around a lot more than he used to before pulling into an intersection.

Joe Jablonski, 74, learned this neat trick: Make sure you can see the car you just passed fully in your rearview mirror before pulling your vehicle back into the right lane.

"I used to turn the blinker on and just go-and say a few Hail Marys," Jablonski said of his driving habits before he took the National Safety Council's defensive-driving course.

The course, taught by Roden S. Lightbody, Ocean County's traffic engineer, serves as a refresher for senior citizens, many of whom took their driving test more than 50 years ago. It was attended by 152 residents of Holiday City South in Berkeley Township this past fall.

Many of the seniors said they're breaking a few bad habits they learned during many years of driving and now feel more confident on the road.

Even if you take the course, it's on the road that matters," said Tony DiTucci, 73, another Holiday City South resident who took the course. "It's that instant on the road when you react that everything comes out."

DiTucci follows the two-second rule.

"When on the parkway going 60 mph, the old rule was to allow one car length for each 10 mph," he explained. "Now, when a car ahead passes a spot and you count two seconds or more (before passing that same spot), you're OK. I think I'm a little safer now."

That may be fine for those who take the course, but there are 25 million senior citizens in the United States licensed to drive.

An Asbury Park Press review of fatal accident records found that both nationally and in New Jersey, the number of senior citizens involved in fatal crashes has climbed in recent years even as the overall number of fatal crashes has dipped. Seniors in New Jersey have the highest fatal crash rate of any age group, measured by miles driven. Ocean County, where 1 in 4 residents is 65 or older, has had more fatal crashes since 1988 than almost any other New Jersey county.

So what should be done with-or for-America's older drivers?

Keep 'oldies' off the road

The solution, many say, is "get the old fogies off the road," said A. James McKnight, president of the National Public Services Research Institute, which studies issues involving older drivers.

"That's the popular reaction," McKnight said."There are some people for whom that definitely has to happen. But the other side of the coin is finding a way for elderly people to get from one place to the other without an automobile. Elderly people have needs."

If the elderly were forced to adjust their driving habits, "their risk of crash and and injury would be reduced and society as a whole would be better off," researchers at the University of South Florida declared in a 1994 study.

Yet, the researchers acknowledged, that kind of adjustment "is likely to make the elderly worse off due to reduced mobility."

Many older drivers say it would be discrimination to take such actions against them.

"The main reason senior citizens don't want to give up their license is they lose their independence," said Marion Siebern, 68, also of Holiday City South in Berkeley Township. "The buses we have are fine if you want to go to the mall or food shopping. But if you want to go to dinner you can't."

Many seniors say, and studies have confirmed, that not all older drivers are shaky on the road.

Karlene Ball, a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, has been studying older drivers for eight years. She and other researchers at the university, working with a grant from the National Institute on Aging, say they have developed an inexpensive test called the "useful field of view" that can screen drivers and predict which are more likely to have an accident.

"You really shouldn't look at it in terms of age, but by functional ability and impairment," she said.

Picking whom to screen, though, remains a sticking point.

"As you probably noticed, there's a political component in here," Ball said. "Because an older person is likely to say, 'Why are you only focusing on certain ages?' The answer to that isn't a scientific one, it's a practical one, usually....It becomes an issue of how costly is it going to be to screen people. The fair thing, I guess, would be to screen everyone, but sometimes that's not possible."

Ball said states could require testing of people who have an accident, get a speeding ticket, or whose name is passed on to authorities by concerned family members or a physician.

Other experts are dubious about Ball's research. McKnight said Ball's area of research-drivers' visual attention and their ability to act on information-is only one of the 20-plus factors that can affect driving. Four state agencies are testing a more comprehensive screening program developed by the National Public Services Research Institute, he said.

John W. Eberhard, senior research psychologist at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in a paper last year that it's unclear whether licensing officials can detect older problem drivers through the driver re-examination process. While inattention is a major source of problems for older drivers, there is no practical test right now for it, Eberhard said.

Older drivers a touchy topic

Albert L. Tilton Jr. saw the car coming just in time.

It was July 1994. Tilton, then 21, was driving his wife and 10-month-old son to a wedding rehearsal when a 69-year-old driver failed to negotiate a curve on Route 530 in Manchester Township and hit them head-on.

The older driver was killed. The Tiltons, of Berkeley Township, walked away with relatively minor injuries, and amazement at a state system that grants drivers a license at age 17 and never checks up on them again.

"I have nothing against elderly people driving," Tilton said. "There are people in their 20s that are bad drivers. But there should be retesting."

Assistant Ocean County Prosecutor Steven M. Janosko, who heads the county's Fatal Accident Support Team, agrees. He believes that as a population ages and the problem with senior drivers worsens mandatory retesting will become a reality in New Jersey.

"Nobody really wants to get to that point," he said. "But the problem remains. How do you get to the people who are causing the problem without waiting for something to happen? The sad thing is they kill themselves as often as they kill someone else.

But for those who regulate drivers, the issue is a potential land mine.

Only three states-Illinois, Indiana, and New Hampshire-require drivers to be retested at a certain age. Seven states require more frequent license renewals by older drivers.

In New Hampshire, drivers must be re-examined to "demonstrate their physical and mental qualifications" after they hit age 75. The provision persuades some drivers to surrender their driving privileges, but a 100-year-old man from New London and a 99-year-old man from Nashua have been able to pass the test and hold onto their licenses.

In Illinois, people age 75 or older must take a driving test at each renewal. Drivers age 81 through 86 must have their licenses renewed every two years, while those age 87 and older must renew annually.

The powerful American Association of Retired Persons opposes age-related driver testing, saying it is discriminatory and arbitrary. AARP maintains there is no particular age at which driving skills begin to falter. The association favors a combination of education, improved driver testing methods for all ages, and alternative transportation options for seniors unable to drive.

New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles officials step gingerly around the question of whether there should be tighter restrictions on the elderly, or any age group. They simply enforce the laws on the books, and those laws treat senior citizens no differently than any other group of drivers. New Jersey is one of seven states that allow mail-in renewals at any age with no testing.

The DMV does plan to test the vision of all New Jersey drivers every 10 years once it switches over to a new five-year, "smart" license that will contain computerized information about drivers, including their photographs and road infractions, said W. Patrick Scheffer, the division's director of driver control and regulatory affairs. It will be several years before the initiative is in place, however.

In the meantime, Janosko, the Ocean County assistant prosecutor, said he's focusing his unit's efforts on education and enforcement. He said police are reluctant to report older drivers, but need to recognize the type of violations that might signal a problem.

"We intend to heighten the awareness of cops on the road and also prosecutors and judges who ultimately have to deal with the problem, " he said.

Family members, physicians, rehabilitation centers, police departments, and courts can contact the DMV if they feel a driver should not be on the road. The division sends the reports to a medical review panel.

In 1995, driver's licenses were pulled from 1,467 New Jersey noncommercial drivers and 290 commercial drivers impaired by convulsions, strokes, or head injuries, or mental, neurological, cardiovascular, emotional, diabetic, or vision problems, DMV spokesman John Graf said. New Jersey has about 5.4 million licensed drivers.

Family members and physicians are reluctant to report impaired drivers, officials say, partly because the division has to tell the driver who filed the report.

"They'll say to us, 'My father shouldn't driver, but I don't want him to know I told you," said Edward Lawler, the division's interim director of customer services. "We'll say to the son or daughter, 'We have to tell him you reported him.' 'Well, in that case, I'm not reporting him,' they say. Then we'll say, 'Go back to his doctor and have his doctor report him.'"

But doctors are just as reluctant, for fear of antagonizing the patient, official said.

That's what Sheldon Suroff is trying to change.

Suroff of Chesterfield, MO., founded Concerned Americans for Responsible Driving after his son Jason, a 21-year-old college student, was killed in a July 1993 crash with a 91-year-old driver. The man, who was suffering from dementia, crossed into the opposite lanes of an interstate highway and hit Jason Suroff's car head-on.

Suroff had a bill introduced in the Missouri Legislature that would allow doctors, family members, and occupational therapists to report high-risk drivers without fear of a civil lawsuit.

"It's voluntary, not mandatory," Suroff said. "But a lot of physicians don't report right now because they're afraid of being sued."

Suroff says he frequently gets calls from people who believe their family members are no longer able to drive. "They want them off the road," he said. "They don't know what to do, because they're not getting any help from their local police or from the state."

Suroff's bill is not age-based. Requiring drivers to be tested in old age would be discriminatory and politically impossible to push through the Legislature, he said.

"I wouldn't go for it," Suroff said. "I've got a mother-in-law and father-in-law, both 83, and they're driving and they're fine. Plus it would never pass with the AARP and other groups against it. We're targeting impaired drivers."

Kinder, gentler approaches

When Kathy Freund's young son almost died after being run over by an elderly driver in 1988, the Portland, Maine, resident thought of ways to restrict older drivers' licenses.

But soon after, she threw herself into giving seniors an alternative to driving. Freund created the Independent Transportation Network, an innovative car service that gives seniors rides in private cars driven by volunteers.

"I think everyone's first instinct when they look at this issue is to think, how do you regulate who drives and who doesn't," Freund said. "There's a tendency to think that if you figure that out, you solve the problem. But I realized that doesn't solve the problem."

Freund supports testing older drivers-her state retests drivers' vision at age 40, 52, and 65-but says provisions must be made for people who are stripped of their driving privileges, give up their licenses voluntarily, or never drove in the first place.

That need looms large and is expected to increase. There are 13 million Americans age 65 or older, and by the year 2020 there will be 30 million of them. New Jersey had 831,152 licensed drivers 65 or older in 1994, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The figure could top 1 million in the year 2010, according to census projections.

And it is not just a question of numbers. The United States' post-World War II suburban boom has made seniors ever more dependent on their cars to survive.

"They have to drive to manage their affairs," Freund said. "They are in an untenable position. What are they going to do-give up living?"

Short of banning older people from driving, many researchers say the best way to make roads safer is to send seniors back to school. Both the American Association of Retired Persons and the National Safety Council run driving courses such as the one taught recently in Berkeley.

The courses cover right-of-way situations, turning, blind spots, traffic signs, passing, the proper way to approach intersections and pavement markings. They also address ways to compensate for physical changes associated with age such as diminished peripheral vision, glaucoma, cataracts, heart disease, arthritis, and reduced reaction time.

Having taken the driving course at Holiday City South, many of the seniors there say they think the course should be mandated for older drivers-but not retesting by the state.

"You don't have the composure you had years ago," said Lewis N. Parisi, 79, of Holiday City South and a course graduate. "You'd feel any little mistake and they'll take your license away."

Jablonski says the course is much needed for the older age group.

"It sharpens your mind up," Jablonski said. "I saw (an older) woman pass in the double yellow line. I asked her if she knew what that means, and she said, 'No, I have absolutely no idea what that means."

Lampasona changed her driving times since taking the course.

"I wait til mid-morning, after the traffic dissipates," she said. "I'll wait till 9, 9:30 a.m. when it's very safe. It's a much easier time for me."

"Everyone should take the course, if it was only to re-emphasize how they should be driving," Marion Siebern said. "No one really likes to admit their reaction might be a little slowed. You don't have to have Alzheimer's disease to forget things."