American policymakers need to be doing far more to prepare our communities for an influx of aging residents on the roads, a new book argues — and that includes not just preventing car crashes involving elders, but giving them more opportunities to thrive when they can no longer drive.
In his contribution to the forthcoming anthology "Law and the 100 Year Life," which will be available to read online for free on May 20th, professor, lawyer and transportation scholar Greg Shill zeroes in on the role that transportation and land use might play in the projected "silver tsunami," in which millions of U.S. residents will age well past the point where it's safe for them to drive — even as the world around them remains as car-centric as ever.
Shill argues that physical landscape is largely the product of America's legal landscape, especially as decades of excessive parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, restrictive zoning, transit funding cuts and other auto-focused policies have all but guaranteed that most U.S. residents need a car to get more or less everywhere they need to go.
Those policies, though, haven't accounted for the fact that many Americans are now poised to vastly outlive their "driving life expectancy," which was about seven to ten years shorter than total life expectancy for the average U.S. resident back in 2002. And as the baby boomer set reaches their golden years, the gap could get even wider.
"The graying of society [is going] to have effects across so many issue domains; I can't think of one that where it won't be really important, including for transportation," adds Shill. "Because transportation, unlike most other activities that enable people to participate in society, places others at risk."
Staying alive long enough to grow old
Of course, Shill acknowledges that many U.S. residents don't enjoy the privilege of growing old — in large part because so many of their lives are snuffed out too soon in car crashes.
America's average life expectancy began to lag slightly behind other high-income nations during the 1990s, landing just shy of 79 years old before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. (The average resident of the U.K., by contrast, enjoyed an extra two years on Earth that year.) Disturbingly, though, America reports far more early deaths than our peer nations, suffering levels of "potential life years lost" on par with countries like Mexico and Latvia — and road traffic deaths, along with gun violence and drug overdoses, explain much of the gap.
Put another way: even as advances in medicine allow more Americans than ever to age out of driving, more of us than ever are also dying violent, early deaths in car crashes well before our time. And if we are lucky enough to make it to our golden years, our bodies will be more vulnerable to injury and death if we're involved in a crash, even if we didn't cause it.
Those trends, meanwhile, are unlikely to be reversed simply by keeping seniors from climbing behind the wheel when they're no longer road-ready — both because older drivers are actually involved in fewer fatal crashes per capita than middle-aged ones, and because our state licensing bureaus are ill-equipped to find the ones experiencing age-related driving impairments which really should force them to give up the keys.
"Our state DMVs are really not set up to be making those assessments at the scale that they would need to act as an effective screen here," Shill adds. "And so we rely on after-the-fact remedies, like taking away a license after somebody is a bad crash, or imposing other sanctions. But that's often after irreparable harm has been done."
Perhaps provocatively to many urbanists, Shill makes the argument that America won't overcome its road death crisis until we reject what he calls the recent "fad of design essentialism" that arose with the adoption of the national Safe Systems approach, and make room for more enforcement-based strategies — strategies, he argues, that are not synonymous with "violent intervention by armed agents of the state."
Paired with efforts to end police brutality and harassment, he argues those initiatives are essential to directly attacking the most outsized causes of death on our roads, and are a necessary complement to the "important" but "incomplete" strategy of re-designing streets and vehicles, which can all too easily get mired in years of NIMBY gridlock or take decades to ripple across the fleet.
In addition to things like stronger seat belt laws and more speeding stops, he recommends innovative solutions like redistributing a portion of the revenue from speeding fines to drivers who don't speed — something he says Sweden has already successfully tried.
"I think the contribution of the Vision Zero movement is to correctly anchor us a conversation here in the goal of zero deaths," added. "But I think it has taken this idea that you can design your way to safety too far ... Really, what I'm arguing is that we should focus on interventions that maximize life years. And I think it's pretty clear that ... dollar for dollar, there are better opportunities out there, [and] that they're not being seized right now."
'You can't outrun Father Time forever'
Shill argues that today's seniors also can't wait for the kind of robust housing production that would make car-free living possible for more aging Americans — which is why cities need to do a better job of marketing the assets they already have, while making changes serve senior residents.
Drawing on the phenomenon known in economics as "Tiebout sorting" – which means, essentially, that people will vote with their feet and move to places with policies that meet their needs, at least if they can afford to do it — Shill argues that non-driving (or soon-to-be-non-driving) retirees represent a massive untapped market to which developers can and should cater.
And while that phenomenon certainly has its limits — especially among seniors who don't want to move far away from grandkids, lifelong friends, and beloved homes with paid-off mortgages — Shill argues that communities could win or retain older residents by touting their neighborhoods' ability to meet their basic transportation needs, even when driving is no longer an option.
"Some municipalities market themselves as being not just a good place to retire, [but] as a good place to become very old – and specifically, to be able to reach all your daily needs without needing a car," Shill says. "That might stimulate change in the places where people are not leaving."
Critically, Shill argues that many kinds of communities can evolve to serve the needs of a graying population as they lose the ability to drive, whether with walkable main streets in intergenerational small towns, bustling big-city bus systems, or even micotransit vehicles in gated communities built for seniors alone. And he argues younger urbanists should embrace all those forms of car-free living, even if they're not always the version they would choose for themselves.
"There should be multiple flavors of high-access communities, whether it's golf carts, or small autonomous shuttles, or walking, or transit," Shill adds. "I think we should embrace the heterogeneity of preferences, all [towards] the goal of enabling people to be where they want to be and access what they want to access without needing a car."
However they do it, Shill says Americans can't wait to confront the challenges that our rapidly-aging population will poise for our transportation system much longer — especially since the census bureau projects that in just 10 years, seniors will outnumber people under 18 for the first time. And if we do so, people of all ages will benefit from a less car-dependent world — especially if we were lucky enough to grow old ourselves.
"A colleague of mine says, 'In the best case, we are all living in a period of temporary ability,'" Shill adds. "When we're very young, we need assistance to not just transport ourselves, but to do all the things in life — and late in life, that is true for all of us as well. And so at some point it becomes unsafe to drive ... We can't outrun Father Time forever."
