Should older people take driving lessons?

The latest research into older driver behaviour suggests that that tailored driving lessons can improve safety on the road for older drivers.

Now, a new website launched by UNSW Sydney and Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) is designed to help older drivers navigate licensing rules that differ from state to state while providing advice on how to keep driving longer.

Scientia Professor Kaarin Anstey is an expert in cognitive aging and has been involved in several projects researching older driver safety at UNSW Sydney. Her team at NeuRA has recently completed a randomised controlled trial of older drivers — called the Better Drive Study — to see whether driving skills can be improved despite the physical and cognitive challenges of old age.

“We know that older drivers have higher rates of crashes than middle-aged drivers,” said Anstey. “And we see an uptick of crashes particularly in the over-80s. But until recently, the way that has been managed is through regulation, in licence removal, which is basically an all-or-nothing approach. But for some older drivers, they got their licence when they were 16 and they tell you they learned to drive in a paddock. And now the driving environments have completely changed, cars have changed, and they’ve never done any refresher courses.”

How was the trial carried out?

In the trial, drivers over 65 were put into three groups. The first completed a road rules refresher course, which Anstey said effectively functions as the control in the experiment. “Previous research has shown it improves knowledge but not necessarily driving safety or crash risk,” she said.

The second group was videoed as they drove — with one camera pointing outwards to the road and one trained on the driver. At the end of the drive, participants were played back any errors they made. For the third group, the drivers received the video feedback with the additional benefit of lessons tailored to focus on their errors.

The researchers have followed the drivers in the three groups after 12 months, to see if their driving improves over time.

“We haven’t yet analysed our results as we’ve just completed our last assessment. But in our pilot study, which was very similar, we found that of the people that had our intervention involving driving lessons and video feedback, we moved a significant proportion from unsafe to safe drivers, and we reduced their driving errors,” Anstey said.

While the researchers do see a similar range of errors made by older drivers in the study that are different to the sort made by young drivers, not all mistakes being caught are necessarily due to the effects of old age.

“A lot of these are just bad habits that drivers have brought with them from their younger years,” Anstey said.

Dementia and driving

While dementia was screened in participants for the purposes of the Better Drive Study, having dementia does not necessarily result in disqualification of a person’s driver’s licence.

“If a person has dementia, they have to be given a restricted licence that limits them to driving close to home,” Anstey said. “Most people continue to drive with early dementia. In fact, international research shows that people with Alzheimer’s disease continue to drive for 18 months to three years after first diagnosis.”

This may partly be due to the fact that GPs and clinicians are getting better at diagnosing early stage dementia which in the past would have been undetected, and the person would have continued to drive as normal. But it does also depend on what type of dementia is detected — there are some forms of dementia that exclude people from driving, particularly those that seriously affect coordination, or the planning and decision-making parts of the brain, known as executive functioning.

“For these reasons, whether or not you can drive has to be decided on an individual basis by a GP and occupational therapist,” Anstey said.

The different states in Australia have different rules around assessing someone’s physical and cognitive fitness for driving. The rules range from self-reporting medical conditions that may affect a driver’s ability — as is the case in Victoria — to annual medical assessments from a GP after the age of 75 and practical driving tests once over the age of 85, as is the case in NSW.

The road ahead

Anstey said she would like to see intervention and improving driving skills for older drivers become an accepted part of our driving lives.

“People don’t naturally ask themselves, ‘Do I need to update my driving skills?’,” she said. “The idea is that we need to put some effort into improving our driving and maintaining our skills, and it shouldn’t be stigmatised at all. It could be something like, when you turn 50 you’re invited to have an extra driving lesson just to check in on your driving. At the moment you’d only get that if you had something wrong with your driving. It’d be better to make it a normal part of life.”

The Better Drive Study concluded in September 2024 with results to be made available in 2025.

Image credit: iStock.com/Halfpoint