IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/itsrrp/qt2j74s5z5.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

2021 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Fact Sheet: Aging Road Users

Author

Listed:
  • Chen, Katherine L.
  • Tsai, Bor-Wen
  • Fortin, Garrett
  • Cooper, Jill F.

Abstract

The older adult population in the United States aged 65 and older is expected to almost double between 2016 and 2060, from 49 million to 95 million. In 2019, there were 7,214 people aged 65 and older killed in traffic crashes in the United States; this accounted for 20.0 percent of all traffic fatalities. To provide context, the overall population aged 65 and older accounted for 16.5 percent of people in the United States and 20.2 percent of all licensed drivers in 2019. California has the largest number of licensed drivers aged 65 and older in the nation with 4,516,813, or 16.6 percent of all licensed drivers in the state. However, as drivers age, physical and mental changes including reduced visual acuity, increased fragility, restricted movement, and cognitive impairment can directly and indirectly result in age-related driving impairments. Historically, road safety efforts focused on changing human behaviors to prevent crashes. The Safe System approach reframes efforts to save lives by expecting crashes to happen and focusing attention on reducing the severity of injuries when a crash occurs. By understanding the nuances of aging road user crashes, transportation professionals can better address every aspect of crash risks and implement multiple layers of protection to ensure that everyone traveling on California roadways will go safely. Analyses presented in this section include fatal and serious injuries to drivers, passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and other non-motor vehicle occupants aged 65 and older.

Suggested Citation

  • Chen, Katherine L. & Tsai, Bor-Wen & Fortin, Garrett & Cooper, Jill F., 2021. "2021 SafeTREC Traffic Safety Fact Sheet: Aging Road Users," Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings qt2j74s5z5, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt2j74s5z5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2j74s5z5.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social and Behavioral Sciences;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt2j74s5z5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/itucbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.