America is Aging. And Seniors Will Suffer Disproportionately From a World Built Around Driving.
American culture may treat driving as a universal activity, but think for a minute about the people in your life who never or rarely drive.
Our world is isolating and disempowering for the 32% of Americans who do not even have a driver's license. This includes children, those without access to a car, those with a disablility that precludes driving. Even among those who are licensed drivers, there are many more who drive rarely or never. And this is especially true of a rapidly growing number of senior citizens for whom driving has become more difficult or taxing.
In the early days of the automobile, it was a luxury, great for weekend picnics or sightseeing rides through the countryside. Gradually we've built a world where the car is instead, as Jeff Speck says, a "prosthetic device." We need it to function with any sort of convenience or dignity, and as we've denuded, flattened and spread out our cities, we've made it so things exist not only at too great distances to walk, but even to drive at slow speeds.
And older Americans—who will number 77 million by the year 2034—are one group who suffer disproportionately from this world we've built.
Our Streets Aren’t Safe For Seniors (Or Anyone)
https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-severe-injury-death/ . Click image to view larger.
According to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, Americans over 75 walk for about 9.5 percent of all trips. This is slightly lower than the national average of 10.5 percent. But older adults are disproportionately represented in pedestrian fatalities and injuries. According to Smart Growth America's Dangerous By Design 2019, the relative pedestrian danger for older adults age 50 and above is more than a third higher than it is for the general population, and for people age 75 and up it is almost twice as high.
When an older person walking is hit, they are far more likely to be hurt. According to AAA, the average risk of severe injury or death for a 70-year old pedestrian struck by a car traveling at 25 mph is similar to the risk for a 30-year-old pedestrian struck at 35 mph. These charts from AAA's study of vulnerable road users make the difference clear:
It's for this reason that Strong Towns has a simple mantra when it comes to safety on our streets:
#SlowTheCars.
The only safe travel speed on an urban street, where people may be out and about walking, is one slow enough that severe injuries will be rare and deaths nonexistent, even if the driver or pedestrian makes a mistake. An error in judgment on a walk to the store should not cost anyone their life.
For seniors, it's doubly important that #SlowTheCars be our focus, because traffic control devices are often designed with younger people in mind and fail to make walking a safe activity. As Dangerous By Design observes:
Compared to younger people who are struck and killed by drivers while walking, older adults killed while walking are more often at an intersection or within a crosswalk. Part of the reason for this is because even when transportation planners provide people with marked places to cross the street, the amount of time provided to rush all the way across often isn’t adequate, especially for older adults and people living with disabilities.
In New York City, where walking is a primary means of transportation, seniors make up 12 percent of the population but 38 percent of the pedestrian fatalities. This has prompted the city to establish a Safe Streets for Seniors program. It is not enough for walking to be a theoretical option. We need to obsess over making it a practical, safe one.
What’s more, if we do, we will find that we make our cities more prosperous places. Slow, walkable streets are more financially productive, supporting the success of local businesses and generating more concentrated value from the same amount of land. Cities and towns made up of connected, walkable destinations foster social interaction and the kind of connection that creates intangible value as well.
The built environment causes near constant indignity and barriers to travel among the car-less. How often do you see one of these situations? (Source: Richard Drudl via Flickr.)
The Indirect Toll of Auto Orientation: Isolation and Lost Opportunity
Not so easily measured as the injury toll among those who work is the invisible toll of those who are deterred altogether from traveling without reliable access to a car.
The environment subjects those who are slower moving—including many senior citizens, and those using assistive mobility devices like a wheelchair or walker — to nearly constant indignity and stress at best, and mortal danger at worst. For every walk signal too short to even make it across the road, every unreachable beg button or wheelchair-inaccessible sidewalk, how many people simply give up?
There is a growing epidemic of isolation among the elderly, with nearly 1 in 5 seniors socially isolated, and total "shut-ins" frighteningly common. Higher rates of loneliness, depression, and poor physical health—if it's a hassle to get to a doctor, you're more likely to go without all but the most urgent care. Prolonged social isolation has been found to be as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
And this is linked to our built environment. A study in the Journal of Medicine and Health found that the rate of social isolation was twice as high for seniors who did not drive as for those who did, and that it increased significant when people gave up driving.
Strong Towns are Accessible to All
Gil Penalosa, the founder of 8-80 Cities, has a simple heuristic: “If everything we do in our public spaces is great for an 8 year old and an 80 year old, then it will be great for all people.”
We've built a world around fast-moving cars that we can scarcely afford. And worse, in doing so, we've also built a world in which countless among us can't participate fully. The value we lose is staggering.
The most important and highest returning investments our cities and towns can make now are in access for those who don’t drive—and this includes the rapidly growing number who no longer easily can. It’s our most vulnerable Americans who stand to gain the most from returning to traditional, walkable development forms and creation a nation of strong towns.
(Cover photo by Ed Yourdon via Flickr)