What shocked me more than almost anything else over the eight months I recently spent in Washington DC was the uncomfortable coarsening of political rhetoric: the way opponents are casually branded “evil” or “nasty”, supporters “nice” (as if those epithets in any way represented the complexity of policy and debate, and as if they weren’t going to be instantly reversed in a smiley photocall).
It isn’t quite the same in the UK (though the Foreign Secretary’s change of tune on the current US administration isn’t far behind). But once you are sensitized to that kind of crude language, you start to sniff it out. That happened to me this morning, waking up to the news that over-seventies might be required to take a sight test in order to renew their driving licence (done every three years). As yet, it’s only rather vague proposals (and there is also a rather slow-growing petition urging much the same). Here are some stats on the issue (thanks to Prof Colin Talbot via X).
I don’t imagine that there can be many over-seventies (and I am in that age bracket, just) who think that they have a god-given right to drive a car when they have significantly lost their sight. The trouble is that, at the moment, all you have to do in order to renew your licence after the age of seventy (so far as eyesight goes) is tick the box, confirming that your vision is fine, and send off the online form. I am sure that there would be nasty insurance complications down the line if you had an accident and were proven to be seriously sight-impaired – let alone the horrible injuries you might have caused to yourself and others in the process. But the temptation is surely just to tick the box.
According to some of the reports, most European countries demand that you actually get your eyesight officially tested, and many other countries have complicated arrangements, differing from state to state, but are broadly tougher than ours. And here you take a simple vision test when you do your driving test in the first place (reading a number plate at 20 metres, with your glasses or contacts, if you wear them). If you can’t do that, then the test is cancelled and your (provisional) licence is revoked. You have to take further vision tests before you can start the process again. I really don’t see the problem with the new proposals.
But the headlines this morning, even on BBC Radio Four, were full of lines about the over-seventies being “forced” to take a sight test and being “banned” from driving if they failed. Hang on, I thought. A sight test is going to be a “qualification” for licence renewal (asking no more, I think, than what you currently self-certificate) and a licence will not be issued if you can’t see well enough to drive. A bit different from “forcing” and “banning” – but it’s the same downward trajectory of language I saw in the US. It’s as if there are enemies out there all the time. It’s obvious that pensioners with failing sight are not the only dangerous drivers on the road. But some of them are, and this is a fairly simple remedy (which wouldn’t work for that other danger group, young men who have just passed their tests – but I think there may be other proposals in the pipeline there). From the old people’s point of view, and particularly in the countryside, the real issue that needs a solution is convenient public transport. I don’t think it is reasonable to say that you are not allowed to drive, so therefore stay at home and wait for the one bus a week!
The post The right to drive? appeared first on TLS.