Jon E Burkhardt

Tomorrow's older drivers : Who? How many? What impacts?

Most older Americans travel by car, either as drivers or as passengers, to fulfill their local travel needs. The numbers of drivers 65 years old and older will at least double over the next 30 years. The proportion of older drivers on our streets also will increase significantly, and older drivers will be driving more (taking more trips and driving more miles) than before. The total amount of travel that older drivers will undertake will be much greater in 30 years, increasing 400 to 500 percent. The proportion of all driving done by older drivers will nearly triple by 2030, even according to conservative estimates. With no changes to current crash-related fatality rates, the number of fatalities involving elderly drivers in 2030 could be three to four times greater than in 1995. If this occurs, the number of elderly traffic fatalities in 2030 will be 35 to 71 percent greater than the total number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities in 1995—a fatality number now viewed by policy makers and the public as cause for serious concern. Additional public- and private-sector responses will be necessary to provide for the safe mobility of all our citizens, including new kinds of vehicles, new designs for roadways, and new forms of transportation services. The costs of not responding to these challenges will include the increasing isolation of our oldest citizens and the loss of their potential contributions to our society—and may include avoidable traffic injuries and fatalities.

Mobility Changes: Their Nature, Effects, and Meaning for Elders Who Reduce or Cease Driving

Definite mobility changes occur when older drivers reduce or cease driving. In a majority of cases, mobility declines. Fewer trips will be taken, shorter distances will be traveled, fewer or no trips will be taken under certain conditions, and the older person will be more often traveling according to the schedules and convenience of others. Older drivers make about six trips/week, in contrast to two trips/week for older nondrivers. The older person who reduces or ceases driving bears the brunt of the changes that occur in terms of monetary, social, psychological, and emotional costs. When it is not possible to maintain previous connections established by our elderly citizens, society suffers from the lack of access to the expertise of these older adults as well as from the loss of their productivity as workers and volunteers. Thus there are many reasons to take steps to reduce the potential mobility losses associated with the reduction or cessation of driving. The concept that life depends on driving is less prevalent when other travel options are available. Adults who had access to a well-developed public transportation system and who could live in close proximity to the kinds of shopping and recreational opportunities that appeal to seniors felt that a car was not a necessity to live an active life. They could control their mobility choices and could make reasoned choices about whether to drive.

Who is attracted to carsharing

Carsharing offers access to cars and other vehicles without ownership of those vehicles. This transportation option is growing rapidly in the United States and Canada. In appropriate community settings, carsharing can increase mobility, reduce vehicle travel, and complement other transportation modes. In a TCRP project that provided a wide-ranging analysis of carsharing in North America, direct contacts with carsharing members through focus groups and a web-based survey were used to determine demographic characteristics of users, their travel patterns, and their attitudes about carsharing. Special attention was paid to why members joined carsharing organizations, how they used the services, and what they liked and disliked about carsharing. With descriptive statistics from the Internet survey and qualitative analyses of focus group results (both checked against previous literature), it was determined that carsharing appeals to individuals who can be considered to be social activists, environmental protectors, innovators, economizers, or practical travelers. Carsharing companies and their partners could conceivably increase their membership by targeting such individuals and others with certain demographic characteristics.

Economic Benefits of Coordinating Human Service Transportation and Transit Services

In many communities, multiple public and private agencies and organizations provide transportation services to people who have special transportation needs. These providers often receive funding from many sources, including federal, state, and local government programs as well as charitable and nonprofit programs. Program-specific funds are often accompanied by service objectives for specific clienteles and by unique rules and requirements. If such transportation services operate separately, independently, and in an uncoordinated fashion, they frequently demonstrate serious economic and service problems. Coordination can address such problems. Coordination strives to maximize the efficient use of resources such as vehicles, personnel, and funding. It attempts to reduce service duplication, increase vehicle sharing, and improve service quality. It can lower the cost of providing transportation, and communities can apply the cost savings to increase service or simply reduce costs. New research has found that significant economic benefits—including increased funding, decreased costs, and increased productivity—can be obtained by coordinating human service agency transportation and transit services. Implementing successful coordination programs could generate combined economic impacts (after considering all costs) of about

Strategies and Tools to Enable Safe Mobility for Older Adults

700 million per year to transportation providers (human service agencies and transit agencies) in the United States. Total benefits (beyond those benefits accruing just to transportation providers) are even greater. Particularly successful coordination strategies include transit agencies providing trips for Medicaid clients, nontransit agencies providing Americans with Disabilities Act and other paratransit services, transportation providers shifting para-transit riders to fixed-route service, local human service agencies coordinating their trips, and communities expanding transit services into unserved areas.

CRITICAL MEASURES OF TRANSIT SERVICE QUALITY IN THE EYES OF OLDER TRAVELERS

Older adults rely mostly on driving to accomplish their transportation needs. With age-related functional limitations, most notably cognitive decline and dementia, vision impairment, and arthritis, driving may become more challenging. Seniors may need to find ways to maintain or enhance their driving ability or utilize alternate methods of transportation. Based on recent research and product development, a variety of resources are now available to assist rehabilitation specialists and related healthcare professionals in providing programs and information to their older patients. This article provides a comprehensive listing of programs, Web sites, and informational materials to assist older people in remaining safely mobile later in life.

Better Transportation Services for Older Persons

Older travelers use public transportation services for relatively few of their trips. Attracting additional older riders will require that transit operators pay more attention to the specific mobility preferences of older travelers. Focus group research generated measures of transit service quality. These measures rate factors that affect the relative levels of consumer satisfaction for older persons, who rate certain factors differently from other travelers. The travel attributes that were most highly valued by seniors in the focus groups are used to assess current travel modes and to suggest near-term and long-term improvement strategies for public transit operators. Public transit systems most likely to succeed in attracting older persons (and other riders as well) are expected to be those systems that offer the following: more choices in travel modes and their corresponding attributes, especially price; greater focus on higher-quality services; and greater degree of service articulation, in which travel services are more closely tailored to the specific travel needs of the individual traveler and a specific trip.

Door-Through-Door Transportation: The Final Frontier

Improvements to public transportation services are being made, or can be made, to offer better public transportation services for older travelers. Communities in which some of the most forward-looking ideas have been applied were examined. A number of short-term, low-cost improvements have been shown to be beneficial, but new perspectives are also needed. In the long run, multiple types of services, offered at varying prices, are needed to replace the “one size fits all” approach to public transportation with options that riders could choose on their own to fit the specific demands of individual days and trips. Shared-ride, demand-responsive services, dispatched and controlled through advanced technologies, could provide higher levels of service than now available and at higher levels of productivity and cost-effectiveness. Frequent, comfortable, affordable, spontaneous service to a wide variety of origins and destinations over a wide range of service hours is what seniors desire. A serious challenge for the public transportation industry will be finding ways of providing such services while collecting revenues that cover their costs. A key finding of this research is that the transportation service attributes most highly valued by older riders are not markedly different from those valued by other transit riders, so that improvements that would best serve older riders will also attract significant numbers of other riders.

Successful Coordinated Transportation Services in Rural Communities

Door-through-door transportation offers a high level of service for travelers who have significant mobility limitations. Obviously a place exists for these services in a transportation network offering a multimodal family of services, but these services are too often overlooked in standard community transportation planning efforts. Thus, they typically become the last tier of services offered in a community. Door-through-door transportation services allow frail and disabled individuals to continue living in their own homes and still stay connected to the services and activities that they need for health and happiness. Door-through-door transportation services also provide real assistance to people who act as caregivers for seniors, people with disabilities, and others in need of highly personalized transportation services. These services are extremely important to the quality of life of the riders, their caregivers, and those who provide the rides. A project sponsored by the Administration on Aging explored the concept of door-through-door transportation services with the objective of providing insights and inspirations for people and communities that might be considering the implementation of door-through-door transportation services. Case studies were used to develop a list of characteristics of door-through-door services and to identify the factors that led to successful operations. It was found that such services operated with a wide range of program characteristics and that the most successful programs appeared to be those most closely tailored to the individual needs of their communities.

Travel Training for Older Adults Part I: A Handbook

Many share the vision of improved mobility for all residents of rural communities and look forward to productive and cost-effective transportation services with much public support. But today many rural communities still face meager transportation funding, multiple funding sources and service objectives, limited services, and inadequate public interest and transportation investments. As a result, coordination initiatives are receiving even greater attention at all levels of government. A TCRP project focused on how to implement coordinated transportation services in rural communities. New data included a survey of coordination practices of all 50 states and case studies of dozens of coordinated transportation operations. Ten states and 29 local sites were found to offer significant lessons about procedures and strategies. These efforts resulted in a list of coordination strategies that rural communities could pursue toward realizing significant transportation benefits. Although the process can be challenging, coordination offers resource management strategies to improve the performance of various individual transportation services and overall mobility in a community. Greater efficiency helps to stretch scarce and precious funding and personnel resources of the agencies. Coordination can significantly reduce per trip operating costs for rural transportation providers. People with special transportation needs often benefit from the greater amount of transportation and higher-quality services when transportation providers coordinate operations. Coordinated transportation services often have access to more funds and are thus able to achieve economies of scale. They have more sources of funds and other resources. They also can offer more visible transportation services for consumers in rural communities and less confusion about how to access services.