Challenges for Older Drivers in Urban, Suburban, and Rural Settings

Abstract

Along with age-related factors, geographical settings—urban, suburban, and rural areas—also contribute to the differences in fatal crashes among older drivers. These differences in crash outcomes might be attributed to the various driving challenges faced by older drivers residing in different locations. To understand these challenges from the perspective of the older driver, a focus group study was conducted with drivers 65 and older from urban, suburban, and rural settings. Guided-group interviews were used to assess driving challenges, mobility options, opportunities for driver support systems (DSS), and alternate transportation needs. Content analysis of the interview responses resulted in four categories representing common challenges faced by older drivers across the settings: behavior of other drivers on the road, placement of road signs, reduced visibility of road signs due to age-related decline, and difficulties using in-vehicle technologies. Six categories involved location-specific challenges such as heavy traffic situations for urban and suburban drivers, and multi-destination trips for rural drivers. Countermeasures implemented by older drivers to address these challenges primarily involved route selection and avoidance. Technological advances of DSS systems provide a unique opportunity to support the information needs for route selection and avoidance preferences of drivers. Using the content analysis results, a framework was built to determine additional and modified DSS features to meet the specific challenges of older drivers in urban, suburban, and rural settings. These findings suggest that there is heterogeneity in the driving challenges and preferences of older drivers based on their location. Consequently, DSS technologies and vehicle automation need to be tailored to not only meet the driving safety and mobility needs of older drivers as a population, but also to their driving environment.

The health equity characteristics of research exploring the unmet community mobility needs of older adults: a scoping review

“…Some features of environmental design such as flat, non-slippery surfaces directly improved community mobility [42]. Conversely, community mobility limitations were linked with faulty design features and often associated with rural environments [47][48][49]. Rural and urban environments were compared in several articles [42,[47][48][49][50][51][52][53], with rural environments having more factors deemed undesirable in terms of accessibility, safety, availability of services and cost considerations.…”

Improving Our Understanding of Driving Changes in Preclinical and Early Symptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease: The Role of Naturalistic Driving Studies

“…Much research is needed to understand how preclinical and early symptomatic AD interact with other external driving factors, such as road type (e.g., interstate versus two-lane highway), traffic density (e.g., rush hour), intersection behavior, and awareness of objects (e.g., pedestrians, other vehicles) in the driving environment. Driving behavior is known to differ from city to city as well as in rural compared to urban environments [73,74]. Examining how the presence of preclinical and early AD changes driving behavior in these different types of geographic locations is also a fruitful area of enquiry.…”

Detecting Change between Urban Road Environments along a Route Based on Static Road Object Occurrences

“…The examples below demonstrate that "off-the-tune" change detectors may behave fairly haphazardly. In [17], approaches are proposed to deal with such behavior of the change detectors. These approaches shown in Figures 1a and 2a, respectively, one notices the symmetry between these.…”

“…The examples below demonstrate that "off-the-tune" change detectors may behave fairly haphazardly. In [17], approaches are proposed to deal with such behavior of the change detectors. These approaches are essential if several differently tuned change detectors are to be used within a compound system, e.g., for the purpose of RET detection and identification, rather than CD.…”