Despite the inevitability, it’s understandably hard to think about: What happens when you’re too old to live independently? For aging Baby Boomers – folks born between 1946 and 1964 – the concept seems particularly verboten. A recent AARP survey confirmed that of Americans aged 50 and older, 41% believe they’ll never leave their current home. Moreover, they think this regardless of their uncertainty or lack of confidence in their community’s ability to support them as they age. It brings up the little-discussed concept of “driving life expectancy,” a period of one’s life that most Americans have never heard of.
What is driving life expectancy?
The term refers to the stretch of time a person lives after they’ve stopped operating a car. Per a 2002 study published in the National Library of Medicine, aging adults live an average of 11 years without the ability to drive.
At 23 years old, the study is fairly outdated, but it seems to be the most official paper out there on the subject at the moment. In any case, it’s a long time – and Lloyd Alter, an architect with a focus on sustainable living, is worried that Baby Boomers aren’t thinking clearly about cars.
“That might mean 11 years of failing health in a single-family house in the suburbs, without a car, without family nearby, and without being in a walkable neighborhood,” he wrote in a recent (and charged) Op-Ed.
It could also mean four or five years of deeply struggling to attempt to drive when you really shouldn’t. That means car accidents that harm or kill elderly drivers, their occupants, or anyone else involved in such collisions.
“Depression, adverse health outcomes, being a burden to family and friends, all because our society is so dependent on cars.”
In the U.S., losing the ability to drive severely affects one’s quality of life. And Baby Boomers, Alter says, don’t want to even consider the idea of losing this level of independence. Rather, their focus seems to be more on modifying their single-family homes to accommodate their declining mobility. They’re forgetting, he says, that their communities are mostly designed around having a personally owned vehicle to access local amenities. This includes groceries, healthcare, and recreation, for instance.
“Everybody worries about ramps and interior mobility issues, yet they are far less of a problem than that blue line for household activity; it includes difficulty with shopping, money management, housework and driving,” he writes, “It’s crossing 60 percent at 80 and over. Nobody wants to talk about losing the car keys.”
“People just don’t think it will happen to them, and they do not prepare to give up driving.”
Per the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2020, about 76.4 million Baby Boomers were living here.
“Almost all of which will not be able to drive at some point,” Alter says. “We need accessible housing, and walkable communities with good sidewalks, corner stores, medical facilities and coffee shops within a reasonable distance. We need good safe accessible transit for when we have to go further.”
Alter urges North Americans to seriously prep for a future without driving. “And as the AARP study shows,” he laments, “almost nobody is.”
