Tag: Safety

Driven To Drive: An Identity Crisis?

On By Mary KochIn Uncategorized1 Comment

An update of Rene Descartes’ declaration, “I think therefore I am,” is long overdue. For my generation the existential truth is, “I drive, therefore I am.”

I still vividly recall the freedom and power I felt on May 12, 1960, my sixteenth birthday, when I passed my driver’s license test. As drivers, we not only have the liberty to go wherever, whenever we want, our vehicles become integrated with our persona. Watch any car commercial.The ads are not about the vehicle but about how you’ll feel driving it. We’ll feel forever youthful driving that sleek sports car. Or forever in charge steering that rugged 4×4 pickup through hostile environments. Those vehicles cruising across our TV screens are an elixir of power and eternal youth. 

Until we’re too old to drive. And just how old IS too old?

Traffic safety experts sidestep a precise answer. So does AI. When I typed in the question, AI offered a laundry list of primarily subjective guidelines: declining physical or cognitive ability, slow reaction times, getting lost easily, frequent close calls, or loved ones expressing concern. Oftentimes, those “loved ones” will be less loved if they start harping about Grandpa’s driving.

Kaiser-Permanente, in a helpful online guide to “Healthy Aging,” offers cold, hard data:

  • People age seventy and older are more likely to crash than any other age group besides drivers age twenty-five and younger. In other words, driving skills improve with age, then regress. We’re no safer now than when we were air-headed teens, oblivious to our mortality.
  • Because older drivers are more fragile, they are more likely to get hurt or die from these crashes.

A joint study by the American Society on Aging and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offers this chilling observation: “Most people drive seven to ten years longer than they should.”

Giving up your car is life changing. I did so two years ago, BUT I had no intention of giving up driving. When I moved to Seattle from rural eastern Washington, my motivations were to save money and reduce my carbon footprint. I gave my 2009 Dodge to public radio. I planned to use mass transit when possible, and rent a car when necessary. 

Public transit — busses, light rail, ride shares — are great. Rental cars not so much. I’ve rarely needed them, but when I do, they come equipped with recently developed, high tech amenities that I can’t readily figure out — like how to START the darn thing. 

I was delighted when my retirement community, Horizon House, recently introduced a car-sharing plan. For a nominal expense, residents can rent an electric vehicle, fully insured, and be trained to drive it before we hit the road. Because I’m past age eighty, I’d have to take a driving test to participate. I think that’s an excellent idea. I’d like to be assured that I’m as good a driver as I think I am — a veteran, after all, of several solo cross-country road trips.

A no-injury accident last year, just after I turned eighty, sowed a seed of doubt. I was driving a rental car in an unfamiliar town. Looking for a place to pull over to make a phone call, I blew through a stop sign and collided with another car — which had a student driver at the wheel. Both cars required towing.

A more experienced driver might have spotted me and taken defensive action. Several people who gathered round the crunched cars claimed it was a notorious intersection with frequent collisions. Still, I was clearly at fault. I acknowledged as much to the police officer, and readily paid my fine. 

And still, there was that traumatized wanna-be driver. I sent her a gift and a note of encouragement. My insurance readily paid for damages to the rental car. I was further grieved to learn that her family’s insurance company stalled for months before paying up. 

I’m sure her dad had plenty to say about eighty-year-old drivers. While I waited for the tow truck, he showed up with his work rig to tow away the family car. Grim-faced, he grunted as we were introduced and maintained a glum silence while hooking up the vehicles. It was Memorial Day. I imagine he’d been home, tending the barbecue. I’d ruined their holiday. 

That’s the thing about our roadways. Most of us do not work in the realm of public safety. Yet our roads and streets — open to all — are where we are most responsible for the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens. It’s where we have true community, where our very lives depend on the skills and consideration of our fellow travelers.

Why is it, then, that I’m struggling with the question: do I keep driving? I enjoy walking and using public transit. I’ve needed to rent a car only a handful of times over the past  two years, and maybe those trips weren’t all that essential. Could it be — and here, dear reader, I’ll reveal the naked truth — that my ego still clings to that steering wheel? Could it be that my ego — my false self — is deflecting any suggestion that I’m “too old” to drive? 

For now, I’m side-stepping the issue. I have no immediate need to drive anywhere. The car-share program will wait. My driver’s license is still in my wallet, valid until May 12, 2031. It is merely a plastic ID card. I’m working on making it not who I am.

Is that Descartes at the wheel?

Who Keeps Us Safe? (sometimes we never know)

On By Mary KochIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Savoring my morning coffee, scrolling through email, I suddenly became aware of a red rope slowly snaking downward outside my thirteenth floor window. What the …!? No way of telling where it came from or where it was going. Before long it was joined by a blue rope, the two of them swaying in the breeze, a sinuous tango, occasionally touching, then parting.

Mystified, I went about my morning ablutions. When I emerged from my bathroom, I discovered a man in a boatswain’s chair outside my window, expertly clearing away soap with his squeegee. I’ve long admired the efficiency of professional window washers. With just a few graceful swoops, they make the world brighter and more clear than it was. Still, I prefer to watch them work when they have both feet planted on the ground, or on a low ladder. Because of my own exaggerated fear of heights, I don’t like to see anyone in precariously high locations.

The window washer, noticing me, smiled and waved. I placed my hands over my heart to signal both apprehension and appreciation. He put his hands together and gave a bow. Then, as he began to lower himself to the twelfth floor, he pantomimed falling, first with a startled expression that gave way to a big grin. Obviously an act he’s perfected over the years.

I can’t shake from my mind how relaxed, at ease he was, trusting his life to just two ropes. No doubt he regularly scrutinizes them with an eagle eye. Still, it’s a leap of faith, not only in his equipment, but faith in whoever ran the machine that braided those ropes in the first place. He’s vitally connected with someone he’ll likely never meet.

Window cleaning isn’t on the list of the hundred most dangerous occupations, compiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. OSHA reports eighty-eight window cleaning accidents over a fifteen-year period, sixty-two of them fatal. That’s out of millions and millions of windows washed. Squeegee Squad, a commercial window cleaning firm, claims that “statistically speaking, it’s safer to be a high rise window cleaner than it is to drive a cab.”

Or, safer than driving on rural two-lane highways, which is where I’ve driven most of my life. A federal safety initiative reports that more than twelve thousand deaths occur each year on rural roadways because drivers cross the center line or run off the road. That’s about a third of all annual highway fatalities, even though the interstates and city roads handle way more vehicles.

I used to think about that in my frequent travels along SR97, the north-south highway that bisects Washington state. I’d watch vehicles hurtling toward me at sixty mph (usually more) and think, I’ll never meet that driver, but my life depends entirely on their sobriety and attention. I’d silently message them: be aware, be safe. Then there were the occasional heart-in-throat moments when drivers passed recklessly, forcing others to brake and pull onto the shoulder. My messages were less silent and not kind.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in his remarkable Letter from Birmingham Jail. “What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

We think we’re such independent individuals. But whether we’re washing windows on the thirteenth floor or driving along a two-lane highway or just reading words on a screen, we’re all as closely connected as one heart beat, one breath.