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Travel Patterns of the Elderly

Most industrial societies are aging rapidly; people are living longer but having fewer children. Most people in the industrial world will soon pass their 65th birthday as drivers, and if not drivers, then car passengers. Yet, on average, people lose some of the skills necessary to keep driving safely as they age; many others, particularly women, do not wish to keep driving even though they are objectively competent to do so. The increasing automobility of seniors creates a number of policy challenges.

Most transportation researchers have focused on three substantive areas: the travel patterns of seniors, driving safety, and viable mobility options. Cutting across these areas are differences by gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, residential location (for example, suburban versus central city), household structure, and income.

Basic Patterns and Changes Over Time

Older travelers take a much higher percentage of their trips in a car, as a driver or passenger, than did comparable-age people in the past. In fact, seniors take a slightly higher share of their trips by car than middle-aged people; older Americans never take less than 75 percent of all trips and 90 percent of shopping trips in a car. Conversely, less than 3 percent of all trips by seniors are made on public transit; seniors are two to three times more likely to walk than to take public transit.

Older travelers today also take more trips than comparable cohorts of seniors did a decade ago. At the same time, older people make fewer total daily trips by any mode than those younger. This difference is often seen as evidence of a mobility loss. Yet all evidence suggests that older people are very mobile until well into their 70s—many have simply stopped making five weekly work trips, and so their average number of daily trips drops. This is hardly evidence of mobility loss. In fact, older people for at least a decade after they retire make more non-work trips than younger people.

Older people also take longer average nonwork trips than comparable travelers in the past because they have more time to travel, and possibly because they are no longer constrained by the need to conduct these activities near their job or on the way to or from work. Other possible causes for the increase in both the number of nonwork trips and their length may be the convenience offered by the car, living in low-density and rural places where longer trips are necessary, having higher average incomes that are associated with increased trip making, and/or staying in the labor force past traditional retirement age, thus retaining daily work trips that comparable seniors in the past did not make.

Driving Competence and Cessation

Older drivers are among the safest on the road; they obey the law, do not drink and drive, wear their seat belts, and rarely take deliberate risks. Because they take fewer total trips than younger travelers, and often not at peak periods, they have lower per capita crash rates until roughly the age of 80.

However, older people are more likely to die or be seriously injured in a crash of comparable severity than those younger. Moreover, as they age past 75, older drivers on average have more crashes per exposure (that is, miles driven). Many driving skills do decline with age, and most older people will come to a point when they can no longer safely drive.

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