Some years ago Ontario established new procedures for people to obtain a driver’s licence after reaching 80 years of age. The Ontario Ministry of Transportation’s web site spells out the requirements. I have edited them slightly: Once you reach 80 years of age, your driver’s licence will be renewed every two years instead of every five years. To renew your licence you will have to attend a driver’s licence renewal session with other senior drivers. At this session, you will: have your vision tested; take a multiple choice test on traffic rules and signs; and participate in a group education session.
Is that discrimination? Keeping in mind the modern usage of the word discrimination, it certainly is. Back in my childhood, parents and teachers taught me that discriminating was good. Today if you discriminate, people consider it a bad thing. I should write a whole column on the changing meaning of words, but I’ll save that for another day.
When I hit 80 and when you hit 80, the government will discriminate against us; they’ll prepare to withdraw privileges, based simply on age. I know this upsets many seniors who feel they can drive as well as they did at 50. And I think I understand. But I also know that as I have aged the edge has gone off my eyesight. I know that my sense of balance, never good, has worsened. I know that I can’t think as quickly as I could at one time – it makes me cross when contestants on Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy get the answer before I do. So I know that when I reach that dreaded age and report to the ministry, I might have deteriorated even more and need someone to evaluate my skills and ability.
We don’t discriminate only against seniors. We also discriminate against teenagers. We have always used different standards when judging teens. At 18, when I bought my first car, even though I had driven safely for two years, I couldn’t pick my own insurance company. They called it “assigned risk” and made me feel like a leper. But that was nothing like the regulations young people face today. They presently face graduated licences, but will soon face a new set of regulations.
A spate of fatal crashes involving young people triggered the new reforms announced recently. The proposed changes will ban teens with G2 class licences from carrying more than one passenger aged 19 and under at all times during the first year of their licencing period. Present restrictions makes that limitation between midnight and 5am. In addition to passenger restrictions, the legislation will set zero tolerance for speeders and anyone consuming alcohol. As you can imagine the new restrictions have angered many of the drivers it should protect.
What should teenagers think? According to Dr. Philip McGraw, the human brain does not fully develop until people reach their early 20s, severely restricting their judgement. So in this sense the new law makes sense. Unfortunately, the development problem that makes teens more prone to driving accidents, also hinders them from accepting the arguments for creating the new rules.
We seem so concerned with seniors and teens, we overlook the fact people who cannot drive as well as many 80-year-olds and who have less decision-making ability than most teenagers fill our roads. So should we accept this discrimination against seniors and teens?
No, we should not. Instead, we should apply essentially the same rules to drivers of all ages and eliminate hundreds of idiots from our roads.