Persuasive Essay
Parker Rose
188,500 adults over the age of 65 are injured or killed in car crashes every day. Having a car is like freedom for seniors. They can go anywhere and do anything they want to do. However, the body's natural aging process jeopardizes other drivers by slowing reaction times, decreasing visual ability, and harming cognitive and motor function. It is not fair for senior drivers to endanger other drivers because they want to keep their freedoms. There should be mandatory driving tests every year for drivers over the age of 70 because they lose the ability to drive as well as they used to in their youth.
First, elderly drivers lose their ability to drive as they get older. It is a known fact that your reaction time, vision ability, and cognitive ability. Psychcentral.com said that when we get older, we lose brain connections that slow down our reaction times. Also, our eyes can not generate new ocular material faster than we lose it when we get older. Like our reaction time, as we age, we lose brain matter which decreases our cognitive ability too. Also, older citizens are more suspetible to brain diseases like Parkinson's and Altimer's that also effect their ability to drive beacuse they will not remember the rules of the road. Also, muscles weaken as people get older so this would cause people to not be able to press the pedals and turn the steering wheels as well as they used to be able to. Finally, older people are more likely to have heart attacks and other sudden medical emergencies while driving, which could endanger other people while driving. However, yearly driving tests would change this because their vision problems, worsening reaction times, and degenerating cognitive ability would be detected and they would not be allowed to drive, which would make our roads safer and safer for them.
Elderly drivers should be required to retake the driving test because of forgetfulness. Have you ever studied hard for a test and really learned the material for it? Then, a day after the test, forgotten everything? This can happen to elderly drivers. As people get older, they might forget the rules of the road. Elderly drivers endanger everyone else because if they crash, they could crash into other people. Also, elderly drivers are treated differently than younger drivers. Once, an old woman crashed into a Red Lobster restaurant. She even got to keep her driver's license. In a similar story, a unintoxicated 19 year old did by accident the same thing. He was immediately arrested.
In conclusion, elderly drivers should have to take driving retests every year once they reach the age of 70. This would make the roads safer and would allow the stigma of old people being horrible drivers to go away, as only the good elderly drivers would be on the road. The sad truth of the situation is that the body naturally loses abilities when it ages, and the ability to drive is one of them. However, we can keep our streets safe from these people if we just make them retest. Then, we would have just the best elders that could still handle being behind a 2000 pound deadly moving hunk of steel. It made be elderly driver's independence, but should we put our kids, spouses, and other loved ones in Jeopardy so some elderly people can be more free? I think not. As research has shown, elderly drivers need to be retested annually, as they naturally lose things like cognitive ability, reaction time, and vision ability and this would be detected early before they don't see someone and hit them. Annual driving tests would make our roads safer for everybody, including the elderly drivers, as people who could not drive would be able to. If we made annual driving tests mandatory for drivers over 70, the 188,500 crashes could be 0 crashes.