
Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them - edward
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8768827/seniors-aging-car-driving
======
dundercoder
I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind
from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the
hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public
transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around.

America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent
time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recognize how much everything
here is built around the idea of owning a car.

So now my wife has to give rides to our four kids, AND me, and there’s
literally nothing I can do about it except petition for better transit, and
pray self-driving cars get here faster.

Being dependent on rides feels like being 15 again. It’s humiliating being
picked up from a job interview in a parking lot with 200+ cars.

~~~
souprock
On public transit, wouldn't you be unusually vulnerable to crime? Why would
you want a service that isn't safe for you?

~~~
adrianN
What an American comment to make. Public transit works in many cities
perfectly well and you can use it without fearing for your life, or your
wallet. Children in elementary school take public transit unattended.

~~~
souprock
Well, I'm an American. I might feel differently if I were Japanese.

Here, children are driven to school by their parents. When school ends, the
parents are there waiting in their cars. Kids mostly don't even play outside
anymore.

Those of you thinking public transport is fine are likely at least a little
bit physically imposing and/or you are in relatively fancy locations.

~~~
austinjp
What a strange land. In the UK, I was using public transport and cycling to
school by myself from the age of 16. I'm curious, are there large cities in
the USA where this can happen? Are there any significant moves by politicians
to wean North Americans off cars?

Conversely, are there large cities in other countries that are similar to the
US, where this does not happen? I'm going to suspect the Middle East, due to
ubiquitous air-conditioning.

~~~
Clubber
It's because our news is completely unregulated and local news always
spotlights and aggrandizes crimes and whatnot, so that the population is
terrified of itself constantly.

Obviously if people took the time to look at the crime statistics, the chances
of being a victim of a crime is less than half of what it was when I walked a
mile to elementary school every day.

~~~
souprock
For the oddball crimes, that is true. Kids aren't actually getting swiped off
the streets.

For more normal crimes, the lifetime chance of being a crime victim is
serious. For stranger-on-stranger violent crime, there is a total lifetime
probability of about 5.3%.

You might think "oh that is just 5.3% so no big deal", but the chance of dying
in a fire is only 0.09% and we still bother with smoke detectors.

Violent crime is a life-altering event. Given the potential for horrific
consequences, it is reasonable to be concerned about the possibility.
Transportation choices change that risk.

~~~
adrianN
I've been victim of violent crime. Somebody hit me in the face for no reason
at all and ran away. While that sucks pretty bad, dying in a fire, or even
just losing all my stuff in the fire, is incomparably worse. Being a victim of
violent crime doesn't mean that you land in the hospital. Violent crime has a
pretty broad definition.

------
sevensor
My 96-year-old grandmother has macular degeneration in her eyes and neuropathy
reducing sensation in her feet. She can neither see the road very well nor
feel the pedals accurately. The state of Florida just renewed her license for
six more years.

I'd say it's irresponsible of her to keep up the license, except she has no
options. The town she's in recently made it illegal for residents of her park
to drive their electric carts across the street to Publix or down the sidewalk
to the doctor's office. Those are the only two places she needs to go. Some of
her friends who had given up their licenses in favor of electric carts are now
SOL. They have to rely on favors to buy food and go to appointments.

~~~
sjg007
There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. Also
it seems uber could work?

~~~
sevensor
> There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments.

How's your experience been with that kind of service? There's a reason
lawbreaking octogenarians still ride golf carts down the sidewalk to get to
the doctor's office, hoping they won't get ticketed.

> Uber.

I'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? _Ninety-six_?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _I 'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? Ninety-six?_

HN forgets that not everyone has coastal tech money a _lot_.

~~~
lovich
That is true, but periodic Ubers are also way cheaper than owning a car. If
you only need to travel once a week it would likely be far cheaper than car
taxes, gas, and maintenance

~~~
Spooky23
The average social security pensioner makes like $1200/mo. Even with
subsidized housing, not much cash for a smartphone.

~~~
lovich
1200/mo is about what I took home for a year after college. It wasn't great
but I was still able to afford a budget smartphone to use things like a GPS. I
do understand the position of senior who are not doing well financially and I
think we should support them, but supporting them doesn't mean they get to
live the exact same lifestyle they became accustomed to when they were younger
while the rest of society has to deal with reality.

------
revelation
That's because prior to being too old to drive, they didn't give a fuck about
the public transportation system. Actually, even after being too old to drive,
they happily continue to vote against public transportation.

It's bizarre to suggest our transportation system is failing them. It's
exactly the transportation system they voted for, the transportation system a
good bunch of them built, designed, railroaded through poor communities,
terraformed cities to support. It's been failing large swaths of people for
many centuries, but that generation didn't bother. They built this shrine to
the personal automobile.

It's not even a case of buyers remorse. For the longest time in their life,
they happily took advantage of limitless cheap fossil fuels, plenty of
unregulated cars and wide roads to drive them on, and the best part, they
managed to put it all on the tab for the next generation. Its Caligula all
over.

~~~
echlebek
I generally agree, but "many centuries"? Come on. :)

~~~
trgn
ha, imho, it reads as a stylistic choice that fits the exasperated tone I
think.

But there's a certain logic to that statement too. American cities always had
very wide streets, 100 years before the car was invented even. In hindsight,
it's hard to rationalize why really, but it seemed to have been because of
this obsession for utility and practicality. Those very wide rigid grids were
a transport-oriented design choice. To keep the horse shit away, so carts
could make U-turns, so you could dump your bathwater in the middle.

The tragedy was that those wide streets were the seed for cars eventually
destroying urban cores. When cars were invented, they had the space for them
right there. A street that was used for everything (markets, recreation,
horses, ...), suddenly became a 4-5 lane highway filled with loud, stinking,
dangerous cars. Of course nobody wants to live next to that, it's genuinely
awful. It set in motion a vicious cycle of people moving out of the cores and
needing more parking-infrastructure to accommodate that commuting.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> More than anything else, self-driving cars could revolutionize seniors'
transportation options.

But the problem is created by the over-reliance on cars in the first place,
and the fact that cities are planned for cars rather than humans. Self-driving
cars aren't a solution, when the problem is too many cars.

A real solution would be some kind of pulbic transport that's as convenient
and as efficient as privately owned automobiles, but somehow we're much more
interested in trying to solve the much harder problem of vehicle autonomy.

For the record, I live in a town in the South of London, on the East coast.
From the first moment I moved here I was amazed at the number of people with
mobility issues -disabled folks, seniors, parents with prams etc- taking the
bus for shor hops around town. I understand it's very different in the US,
where owning a car is a very big deal, but it _doesn 't have to be that way_.
Choices made in the past dictate the current situation; choices that _can_ be
undone.

------
pbnjay
On the one hand, I don't want this to happen to me either (but I'm more likely
to retire somewhere accessible than the suburbs). But on the other, this whole
situation just screams entitlement. They'd rather stay in their houses with
all of their stuff, which even their own kids don't want [1].

Just imagine if they would actually move out of their houses: it would open up
more housing, making it more affordable to new homeowners. It would alleviate
transportation subsidies to better serve others. It would lower ambulance
costs and reduce time to service. Just by putting older folks closer to the
care they need.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-
parents-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-parents-with-
lots-of-stuff-and-children-who-dont-want-it.html)

~~~
wvenable
I agree with your sentiments here but the other perspective is that you've
worked your entire life, saved up, built up a wonderful home with all your
belongings and now at the end of your life you have to give up everything
you've worked for. Possibly your home is one of the few things that give you
comfort and peace.

~~~
erentz
Well, yes. You can't have one without the other. You want good accessible
living? That requires density and transit.

It's not like the last 70 years of terrible urban planning and lack of transit
construction didn't happen during that "entire life" you speak of.

------
tabeth
I always get an inkling that buses (like Bolt/Mega/PeterPan) + the existing
highway + roads are superior and more scalable than any other type of
transportation, dollar for dollar.

Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the
bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on
having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be
reallocated easily.

Imagine a place like New York, where buses can go out to the suburbs and bring
people into the city and the evening and morning (say, 50% of the fleet), and
during the day 90% of the fleet stays in the city doing intra-city
transportation.

Rail doesn't have this flexibility.

EDIT: Rail definitely has its place, but you almost never hear anyone starting
a bus project. Just curious to why there's relatively little mention of buses
in the public transportation (new project) realm.

I imagine perfected public transportation would involve linking between self
driving cars on the square mile level, buses on the square deca mile (is that
a thing?), rail for a hundred mile radius and obviously planes thereon.

~~~
Johnny555
That depends how many people you need to move and how often you need to move
them.

Rail has a high capital cost, but lower operating cost due to the fact that a
single engineer (and maybe a conductor) can run a 2000 passenger train while a
bus driver carries 50 - 100 people so you only need about 1/20th the number of
operators.

Another drawback of buses on the road is that unless they have dedicated
lanes, they are stuck in the same traffic as cars.

BRT kind of blurs the gap between the two.

~~~
tabeth
These are excellent points, but I reckon boring tunnels, dedicated lanes and
self driving can mitigate the disadvantages you mention.

~~~
innocenat
Steel-on-Steel rail are generally also most energy efficient compared to
rubber-tyred vehicle.

And IIRC, one of the most expensive part of rail building is the dedicated
right of way, so if you are also doing that for self driving vehicle then
might as well as go for rail (if there's demand, that is)

------
nextstep
Car-based transportation sucks at all ages, we just seem to rationalize how
shitty it is for the young and able-bodied. The US is insanely car oriented
and it is a huge step back in quality of life from most of the developed
world.

------
alkonaut
Another one of those things I have to come to HN and read about the US
situation in order to reflect on the situation at home. I never even
considered a situation where I’d be ”trapped” at home.

It works like this: If you aren’t fit to walk to a bus stop, you get tax
subsidized taxi (think it’s about 70 or 80% subsidized).

~~~
xversilov
It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban
environments are compared to the US, and vice versa.

It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is
everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space
around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc.

The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.

~~~
ars
And it's one of my favorite things about the USA. I hate dense European style
cities.

Different people like different things. The nice thing about the USA is you
can pick. You can live anywhere from a remote farm to a dense apartment.

~~~
rayiner
But you don’t really get to pick. Dense European style cities are outlawed in
the US. Hell, dense European style _suburbs_ are outlawed here. My pre-zoning
code suburb has lots that are less than 3,000 square feet. It’s awesome—easy
to walk and you see your neighbors all the time. But it’s completely illegal
to build more neighborhoods like mine. The minimum lot size now is more than
five times bigger—we have legally mandated suburban sprawl. And there is no
justification for it. If people wanted to have big lots, developers would
subdivide lots that way. There is no reason to mandate it by law.

~~~
opportune
Dense suburbs are only "outlawed" because certain places, usually at the
municipality level, zone the buildings that way. You know it is also
"outlawed" for most European cities to build too high vertically too right?

Also, it varies from city to city (and within cities). Although most of the
20-35 crowd probably would prefer a denser city, old people prefer owning
homes with lawns, so they wouldn't even want to live in that kind of place to
begin with.

~~~
davidw
You can get a place with a lawn in Europe, too; you just have to pay for it,
or live further out.

It's very difficult to find a place like our house in Italy in the US: we
could walk to schools, grocery stories, pastry shops, our doctor, cafes, pizza
place, a few barbers and a tram stop to go downtown.

And that's in a suburb of a mid-size city (about 300K).

~~~
brians
I live in a place like that in Lexington, Mass. I commute by bicycle (or wimp
out and drive in bad weather) about 8 miles. Two groceries, the elementary
school, three preschools, an amazing cookie shop, three pizza places, and a
fantastic Chinese place are walkable. Oh, and two dentists and an eye doctor,
plus your selection of churches. A bus line runs from there, every 15 minutes
in rush hour, to the terminus of a subway line. Oh, and a public library.

Now, it’s not perfect: the T breaks down all the time due to criminal
underinvestment, my bike commute is noticeably faster than driving through the
traffic, the mass transit schedule is such that any route with multiple
transfers is insane.

But I’m going to guess that the Italian and Dutch versions of this aren’t
perfect either; it’s a matter of deciding which flaws to live with.

------
blondie9x
Cars are exploitation. Driving isn't freedom it's the most dangerous and
isolating way to move people that exists.

The automobile companies have trapped us into debt and traffic laden commutes
that waste hours of our short lives on this planet and cause roughly 30% of
climate change.

Do something. Get rid of your car and push for better mass transportation and
development near train stations and major urban areas.

Cars are pieces of metal to get us from A to B. Making them out to be
something more than that is self deception. We deserve better.

~~~
Cd00d
That's extreme.

I have a car in NYC. The subway system here is amazing, while also being an
embarrassment.

But, the car provides the freedom to visit friends and family for a day or
weekend. The cost is $200 per month parking and $150 per month insurance, plus
the cost of the car, which is relatively low as we drive less than 500 miles
per month.

We can visit family in 45 minutes or 2 hours (depending on destination),
instead of 3 hours or 5 hours by rail. And, we can make all our departures at
will.

I can't imagine giving up car ownership, and I don't think I'm deluded.

~~~
mysterypie
The flexibility of having a car is undeniable. However, pretty much everyone--
including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Reports, and the
American Automobile Association--agrees that the total cost of ownership runs
to US$8000-$9000 per year for the average person. The cost might be a lot
lower for you, but most people are paying a lot of money for having a car at
their disposal without realizing how much they're spending.

~~~
burfog
Time is money.

He is saving about 5 hours each round trip. If his time is worth $50/hour,
then $8000 for car ownership gets him 32 trips. Add a few more to account for
the cost of rail ticket prices.

He breaks even if he takes that trip about 3 times per month and never finds
any other use for a car.

~~~
tmnvix
> Time is money.

Consider that this way: the time you spend sitting at a desk to earn the money
to pay for your car is commute time.

How long does it take the average person to earn 8-9k (after tax)? I think at
$50/h that might be an additional 5 hours work per week or an extra hour on
your daily commute. For many people it might be more like 2+ hours. Given
this, I would be very surprised if most urban dwellers wouldn't have more
available time/money if they ditched the car for a bike.

~~~
clarry
Most people don't have the freedom to choose to work however much or little
they want. The time you spend at a desk is more or less fixed.

~~~
tmnvix
Save it and retire earlier?

------
spullara
My grandfather I think just gave up on life after he lost the ability to
drive. Taking taxies in St Petersburg, FL in the mid 1990s just sucked.
Inconvenient, expensive and slow. I wish he was still alive today and I could
give him an Uber/Lyft account.

------
AmVess
The old and the poor are increasingly left out of public transport.

The city where I used to live removed the bus routes from the poorest parts of
the city and opened up new routes to the richest part. Buses on the new routes
were almost always empty...rich people own cars, you see.

The city where I currently reside simply shut down their entire bus operation
instead of jerking around poor people.

~~~
WalterBright
> rich people own cars, you see.

The irony is that in Silicon Valley, the rich people ride the bus.

------
GoToRO
Not only seniors. Kids, low income, people with health problems, they all are
strangers in their own city with the current system. All this just so that
young able people can drive. Of course all this can fire back because if you
are the only one that drives and the rest in your family don't, then you are
the driver.

------
Tiktaalik
We can't wait for autonomous cars to arrive. We need to invest in our cities
and rebuild them to make walking and cycling safe and efficient for everyone
from children to the elderly. We need to invest in public transportation
systems that everyone can use.

------
IIAOPSW
I tried having the Uber discussion with my grandmother. We tried to tell her
that its all the same mobility that you're used to. We tried explaining that
this isn't some patronizing service for seniors but in fact something everyone
is doing. We tried explaining how its actually more economical then owning a
car. We tried to explain that letting my Grandfather stay on the road is a
terrible idea that will get them and/or someone else killed. My aunt even got
her an ipad and showed her how to use the damn thing. FFS you press the button
and a car comes. The concepts not hard and she's not that senile.

But what do we get in response for all our efforts? "I just don't want to."

Even in the face of viable technical solutions to the problem of old people on
the road, you still have to solve the unsolvable issue that old people are
insanely stubborn.

------
erikb
This should be labelled "in the US". In Europe the public transport is often
quite good.

------
terenceng2010
Hong Kong has minibus as public transit, which allows for about 16 passengers
per ride. Maybe it is a economical way for seniors' transportation? As it's up
keep cost should be lower than a normal bus.

~~~
dluan
Taipei does as well, and it's used a lot by seniors as they get to ride free.

------
drewg123
I'm really hoping that we'll have self-driving cars by the time that I reach
that stage of life

~~~
ars
How will you get in the car?

If the car itself was the only problem then Uber solves that. But it's not
enough.

~~~
ghaff
I live in an exurban area only about 40 miles outside a major coastal US tech
center city. There's minimal Uber around where I live.

~~~
kdot
You can schedule Ubers ahead of time.

~~~
ghaff
And there are taxi companies as well. The point is that there is minimal
service. You can't just pick up a phone and have a car there is 15 minutes.

------
eeZah7Ux
Please replace "our" with "US" when submitting on HN. Not everybody lives in
US.

~~~
palimpsests
It's just the title of the article, and yes, I think all or most people here
are well aware of the fact that not everybody lives in the US.

When I saw it, I didn't know what "our" referred to, until I read it - I
didn't assume that the use of this word necessarily implied it had anything to
do with my arbitrary country / community / culture / etc.

------
jonathanyc
I think this is an awful situation, but at what point do we call seniors’
desires unreasonable? Is their want to stay in their suburban homes which are
designed for cars really something the state should be concerned about when
the working poor struggle to afford the subway?[1]

I think we should make relocation easy for the elderly who aren’t able to get
around. I think it is terrible if they can’t move from their houses to places
easier to get transportation from. But I really don’t see how this problem is
more urgent and important or even independent of the general problem of people
not being able to afford housing/transportation. Are we supposed to prioritize
the elderly who already have houses over those who don’t?

1: [https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-
affo...](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-afford-
transit-new-york-city-pays-for-it-one-way-or-another/)

~~~
mjn
Imo _some_ level of service even in areas not all that favorable to transit is
reasonable. Or at least, I think it's possible to do at least slightly better.
I now live in a fairly rural part of the UK, a remote region (Cornwall) that
has no real urban areas. And yet just about every population concentration of
over 1000 people or so, here, has a bus that does at least one round-trip a
day. Towns of over 20,000 people have very good, regular service. Of course
it's subsidized, and in the smaller villages it might literally only be once a
day in each direction, but a service does run.

In many American towns and suburbs it seems not even that level of service is
available. And it's not due to the distances or population density either. I
used to live in a suburb of Houston, TX that had 60,000 people, was about 20
miles from downtown, and it had no bus service! Now I live in a smaller and
more remote town in the UK, and it has decent bus service.

~~~
TulliusCicero
The demographic we're talking about is the exact same one that hates transit
and will refuse to fund it.

It's not unlike the rural areas in the US that are heavily dependent on
government subsidies that they vote against.

