Category - Bad Drivers

Well, the “Desreen’s Law” petition is closing in on 200,000 signatures in less than a week! Let’s just look at a sample of some very important posts people have made.

My grandfather is 90 and still driving despite having early onset dementia. The family have tried to intervene, reason with him and spoken with his GP. At the moment there is very little anyone can do to stop him driving; he is so stubborn but nobody has the power to force him to stop…

my 90 year old father in law nearly killed a cyclist – he had very poor vision, was deaf and had slow reactions. He refused to surrender his licence as it was ‘his independence’. My neighbours 85 yr old mother demolished a garden wall and 2 other cars – she mistook the accelerator for the brake and I was on duty in A/E on the day an elderly driver killed a 2 year old boy and maimed his father by driving over a sea wall – again an automatic car and misjudgement with lack of reactions. Finally, my husband was ‘rear ended’ just 2 weeks ago by an 82 year old lady driver, still accelerating when she hit him. He was stationary in the road, indicating to turn right when clear. Her excuse for writing off her car and his was that she had been driving that road for nearly 50 years and “no-one usually stops there to turn right” (into our own driveway incidentally!). My husband still has whiplash. Each driver filled in a ‘tick box’ form by DVLA at 70 stating they were fit to drive…

I would sign this petition a thousand times over if I could. On the 22nd of December last year, my Dad was killed in a motorbike accident. A 90 year old male, had failed to see him when turning into a junction, and cross right in front of my Dad’s path, causing him to die instantly. After months of waiting and trials, he had his license taken from him and a suspended sentence. Because of his age they didn’t send him down. For myself and my family no sentence will ever be enough. I am the eldest of his four children, the youngest was 5 when it happened. He also left behind my mum, who hasn’t been the same since…

We just had an incident in Edinburgh where an OAP was reported driving 4 miles the wrong side of a local motorway narrowly missing 2 head on collisions and had absolutely no idea of the situation…

My own mother was a blustering older driver – with many recent minor accidents (all that could have been worse) – when I would ask her to consider giving-up driving – the response was anger and waffle about freedom – but when she declared she had MS – the DVLA said she would have to re-test – she quietly did not bother proceeding – leading me to make the conclusion she KNEW she was no longer ‘up to it’…

Our eight year old son was killed by a 74 year old driver who we believe was banned because he suffered epileptic fits and was trying out his friend’s new car. As no witnesses came forward his friend took the call, said he was driving and that our son was the one at fault…

My grandad passed when he was 96,but didnt give up the car until he was 90, he was still driving even when it would endanger him and others around him. In his mind, he was able and young, but his body was the opposite. After countless family disputes he eventually gave up the car, under the condition that my dad drove them to get shopping/appointments…

As an older driver I am well aware that my reactions are not what they were. I plan to stop driving in the New Year, I shall be 66…

Someone who I know was killed by an oap driving out of his drive onto a main road so I fully support this…

When my husband was diagnosed with dementia it was our responsibility to inform DVLA which we did, many don’t. Something has to be changed…

As a serving firefighter I have been to several incidents where the elderly driver has been at fault and killed themselves or others…

I’m signing because I am 66 and I am fully aware that my reactions are slowing down especially at night…

I work in Traffic Management and elderly drivers cause most of the problems due to poor sight and reactions…

As a GP it is often left to me to work out which older drivers are safe or not to drive. I have no special training for this task. Older people who are no longer fit to drive often lack insight into this and their families also collude with them on this issue in my experience… As age increases reaction times and awareness can decrease and so I believe that proper retesting is essential for the safety of everyone.

A friend of a friend died in a similar situation leaving behind a wife and a young child and dying too young…

I saw my Dad’s driving as he aged, and yes, he was a danger in his latter days. Older drivers must be tested for the their, and everyone else’s safety…

With the help of my brother and putting a lot a pressure on my dad’s GP, I got his driving licence taken away from him. He is 87 frail but then got a diagnosis of vascular dementia. I work in the memory clinic I knew he was no longer capable. It was a very difficult decision but I could not have forgiven myself if something like that had happened…

My best friends brother was killed while riding his bike home from work by an 89 year old driver. The consequences are devastating…

I had to stop my father from driving because of his condition (Vascular Parkinsonism). He was 86. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do but I’d do it again in a heartbeat…

My husband and 2 daughters were nearly wiped out on the M4 motorway earlier this year. An elderly lady pulled out and caused my husband to make an evasive action…

I know two drivers who both have serious health problems and are determined to keep driving despite having had recent accidents…

I have a neighbor who as dementia and has had it for a year,he has still been driving,Just been assessed because of this,Been waiting weeks for the results,His wife a none driver has been going out with him,Due to family pressures and me speaking up about me concerns,He has stopped,But car is still outside the house,I believe he is 72…

In dec 2011 my mother was knocked down and seriously injured .. She spent 9 days on life support and a bleed to the brain .. Her calf muscle was ripped off her leg and she had to be given cpr as her heart stopped 3 times .. This happened because a car mounted the pavement and knocked her down .. The driver was 82 years of age and hit the accelerator instead of the brake on his Aston Martin!!!! .. He was fined £480 and banned for life .. My mother has to live with her injuries for the rest of her life…

An elderly driver fell asleep mounted the pavement injuring my son and sister in law. My mother in law was killed…

Ma family was killed on the A1 near Gosforth because an elderly driver went up the wrong way on the opposite carriage…

My mum-in-law has dementia. Dementia has robbed her of her reasoning abilities. I had to disable her car to stop her from driving. Neither the DVLA nor the GP would help…

Fortunately my neighbour escaped such a tragedy. An elderly man accelerated and mounted the pavement just outside her house where she was with her children. Thankfully it was only the wall he destroyed…

Regular readers will know that I have a strong opinion regarding older drivers and their frequently flawed self-assessment of their abilities. But I must say that even I was taken aback by the scale of the problem represented by these quotations. And these are just sampled from the first hundred or so posts made within the last two hours! There are thousands more.

My own father is now nearly 90. He suffers from macular degeneration and can hardly see properly at all anymore. About 15 years ago, when his condition wasn’t as advanced (though his eyesight was still seriously impaired), he wanted to go down to Portsmouth to see the tall ships. He asked if he could borrow my car – at the time he was still self-assessing himself as fit to drive, though he hadn’t actually driven since shortly after he retired. I refused point blank, which upset him. But then I found out he was planning to hire a van to drive down there (and to sleep in – all the hotels were fully booked). I told him straight that if he hired any vehicle I would immediately report him to the police! He didn’t go, and shortly after that he admitted to me that he had decided that he couldn’t see well enough and had decided not to renew his licence.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who can understand just how fine a line there was between him driving and not driving (or rather, attempting to drive) a 400 mile round trip. I shiver when I think how many times a similar scenario must get played out – and how many times the outcome will be different to the one involving my dad.

That’s why we need “Desreen’s Law”.

A handful of people commenting on the petition have said it is ageist.

This is soooo ageist, I dont want to sign it thank you…

I find this petition out of order and blaming elderly drivers when the percentage of accidents causing death is far higher among young inexperienced drivers…

These people are idiots. Really, they are. Young people causing problems because they are prats is not the same as old people causing problems because they are physically and mentally incapable of handling a car anymore. Nor does the fact that an elderly driver not being able to drive anymore, so your nan or grandpa won’t be able to come and see you as easily, make it a bad idea to introduce re-testing.

Some commenters have trotted out the old “re-test everybody” mantra. Although I personally wouldn’t have a problem with that, it would be physically impossible to implement. However, it side-steps the core issue of older drivers having health problems which are entirely age-related.

I don’t want to hijack the Desreen’s Rule post, but I was reading Benjamin Brooks-Hutton’s blog and there is one thing he says (as do some of the commentators) which he (and the commentators) are absolutely and utterly wrong about.

If an elderly driver is found guilty of dangerous driving – and especially if they cause death by dangerous driving – they deserve to go to jail for it. This is even more true if they purposely lied in order to stay on the roads.

I’m sorry, Ben, but they do. They are as guilty as a 17-year old would be. And they deserve a sentence of the same duration as the 17-year old would get.

Geoffrey Lederman showed no remorse, and made every attempt to get out of being prosecuted (causing even more pain than would otherwise have been experienced by Ben Hutton). Although little has been made of it, he claimed to have had “an episode” – in my books, given the evidence and the outcome of the trial, that is what is known in the civilised world as “a lie”. A straightforward case therefore took over two years to be dealt with. Lederman could have been put away for 14 years, but he got a very modest 18 months.

Mr Hutton is obviously still struggling to come to terms with what happened, whereas Lederman is almost certainly now back on the streets again (or will be within weeks). Since we know he tried to get out of the charges and showed no remorse, it doesn’t take much to imagine how he’s doing at the moment – and I’d lay odds that it’s not as bad for him as it is for Mr Hutton. Nor should Mr Hutton forget that Lederman came within millimetres of killing both him and his son, not to mention the fact that he ruined the life of Amy Werner, and very nearly the lives of five more pedestrians who he didn’t see (though I suspect that what they witnessed has hardly left their lives untarnished).

Lederman deserved to go to jail. He is very, very lucky he didn’t go there for longer.

As I mentioned in my last article, there is a petition now open demanding a change in the Law so that elderly drivers are forced to undergo proper re-testing once they reach 70 years of age.

This petition was set up by Benjamin Brooks-Dutton, whose wife was killed by an elderly driver who got the brake and gas pedals mixed up and accelerated into her as she walked with him and their young son. He also inflicted permanent brain damage and the loss of sight in one eye to an American student, Amy Werner, who was also in his path.

This blog contains numerous examples of elderly drivers causing death or injury as a direct result of their age, and the fact that they have often lied about their health in order to retain their licences.

Please sign the petition, and pass it on to as many of your friends as you can. It is vital that the government starts listening to sense instead of the voices of those whose votes it might lose if it took action. There is a semi-permanent link on the right of the page which I will keep live as long as the petition is live.

We need Desreen’s Law now.

A few days ago I wrote about how a 98-year old man had been quoted £20,000 to renew his car insurance. The do-good organisations are naturally up in arms over it, suggesting that he should be allowed to drive without any restrictions. I also pointed out how there was recently a fatal crash in Nottinghamshire after an 87-year old managed to get on the wrong side of the M1 at 2am one morning and collided with a van, killing himself and the passenger in the van.

Then this story came in on the newsfeeds. In this case, 82-year old Sheila Fitzgerald set out on a 4 mile journey from Ormskirk to Rainford, in Merseyside, in foggy conditions. She was reported missing, and was found six hours later by police 50 miles away in Gisburn. She apparently “took a wrong turning in the fog and became confused”.

Once we’re through with the Mail’s saccharin-sweet appraisal of the “extraordinary journey”, it is worth noting that in her “confusion” Mrs Fitzgerald had accidentally driven on to the M58, then the M6, then the M65, then the M6 again, before finally getting on to the A59 and travelling in exactly the opposite direction to her home location for about 25 miles. She didn’t have a bloody clue where she was! The entire journey would have taken about an hour – maybe an hour and half allowing for the weather – with an average driver. Mrs Fitzgerald took six hours, remember, and yet when questioned she believed she’d only “been driving for about 20 minutes” and was “just finding her way home”.

Thinking back to the 87-year old and his innocent victim who were killed after driving the wrong way up the M1, you can only shudder to think at what could have happened if fate had been less kind to Mrs Fitzgerald and all those other drivers on the Merseyside motorways that foggy night.

This article is from 2011, but it has had a run of hits lately.

At the time of the original article (2011) I had noticed on one of the forums that someone was saying they’d heard that from next year (2012) it will be an offence to park too far from the kerb (or next to dropped kerbs), and you’ll be fined depending on how far away you are.

That person was a little behind the times. As long ago as 2009 some councils were enforcing parking distances (and this is just one such story from the same year, where 50cm is the maximum allowed distance). But even this feeds off a story on the BBC from early 2008, The new laws came into force on 31st March 2008!

As an aside, in that first link a clown of a councillor (Alistair Thompson, Conservative) says:

It is utterly ludicrous to expect our traffic wardens to go around measuring how close people are parked to the kerb.

What about people with wheelchairs or Zimmer frames that need a space to get out of the car?

Yes Alistair, old chap. Including those people. Just because you are infirm doesn’t mean you can go around behaving in a way which is likely to cause inconvenience, and possibly injury or death in the right circumstances, to others. Parking in the middle of the road is stupid, ignorant, and dangerous – whether you have a Zimmer frame or not. 

The Traffic Management Act (2004) (TMA) is a detailed document, but the version here contains all amendments which have not yet been approved.

The thing is, even under existing laws (and that includes those that were existing before 31st March 2008), it has pretty much always been an offence to park “inconsiderately”, with the police having tow-away powers in order to deal with it. I have always told my pupils that parking more than 18 inches (or 45 centimetres) away from the kerb is too far, and since I read the stories several years ago about councils enforcing it I have added “you could get a parking ticket” to my explanation.

Let’s face facts here: 50cm is half a metre. It isn’t a parking position in any shape or form – it’s in the middle of the road where most people would be driving, and it is extremely inconsiderate to leave your car there, not to mention dangerous. I’m not sure if the TMA specifically mentions 50cm, or if that’s a limit set by the councils when applying the TMA to inconsiderate parking. To be honest, I don’t care – though I’m sure plenty of people out there will.

Can you get a fine for parking too far from the kerb?

Yes.

How far is too far?

I don’t know the exact figure, though 50cm keeps cropping up. A story from a few years ago (which I cannot find) reported wardens out with tape measures making sure no one was more than 18 inches (45 cm) away. If you “park” anywhere near that far away from the kerb – which amounts to not even moving closer to it when you stop – you really do deserve a fine!

Why do people park so badly?

They do it because they are bad drivers who can’t control the car properly. I can’t imagine that anyone would park like that on purpose. Can you?

A 98-year old man was given a renewal quotation of £20,000 on his car insurance in Wales. The story in Wales Online makes much of the fact that the chap in question, Ron Jones, is an Auschwitz survivor who used his car to sell poppies.

This has nothing at all to do with Auschwitz (Mr Jones was a PoW, and in a separate part of the camp to the gas chambers) or poppy-selling.

But it has everything to do with being 98 years old. The insurance company involved, Ageas, says that Mr Jones should not have received the quotation, and they’re looking into it. In fact, he should not have received a quote at all as he no longer meets their eligibility criteria.

The article also says that Mr Jones “used to pay between £200 and £300 a year”. This is as misleading as the stuff about Auschwitz and poppies, since Mr Jones’ most recent premium was ten times greater at £3,000 – no doubt as a result of his age. Mr Jones is undoubtedly someone to be admired for what he did for the country and for what he had to go through. And his poppy-selling is also worthy of admiration. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he is 98 years old.

A few weeks ago there was chaos in Nottingham – throughout Nottinghamshire, in fact. An 87-year old driver had managed to get on to the wrong carriageway of the M1 at around 2am on a Monday morning and collided with a Transit van going the proper way. The passenger in the van, 27-year old Michael Luciw, was killed. He was a “father, son, brother, uncle, grandson and nephew”. He had a baby daughter. The M1 was closed for virtually the entire day as major carriageway repairs had to be undertaken and congestion across the county was massive. The 87-year old was named as Albert Newman, and he also died in the incident. Heaven only knows how he managed to get on the wrong carriageway in the first place, since all the junctions are designed to make that extremely difficult on that stretch of the M1 for any decent driver.

No matter what the do-gooders might say, elderly drivers become an increasing risk the older they get. It doesn’t matter if, like Mr Jones, they can claim never to have had an accident. Advancing years coupled with deteriorating faculties mean that the risk of having a catastrophic one increases, and that means innocent people like Mr Luciw (and his daughter who will never know him) become the main victims. You just have to face the fact that 87 is one hell of an age to still be driving – most people die long before that – and 98 is even more worrying.

I know it sounds harsh, but Mr Jones isn’t a victim in all this. Nor is it a case of ageism. It’s just facing facts.