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Interview with Sandra Rosenbloom, PhD
April 2, 2001
David
Ragland: How did you become
interested in transportation issues?
Sandra Rosenbloom: I guess I
always was. I have some
memory of being in the 6th grade and doing a historical tableau about
hansom cabs in
London
. I got a plastic horse and made some
kind of carriage for the horse to pull and put it all together.
People joked that it’s because my mother and father gave
my brother the electric trains and wouldn't give them to me [chuckles].
I got a Masters degree in public administration at UCLA and
I knew I wanted to work in a transit agency and I never intended to go
on for a PhD. After my
Master's, I went to work for a firm in
Santa Barbara
that was doing urban transportation
work. They had engineers and
scientists, so they thought they'd get some cheap, young graduate to do
urban policy work. The
very first thing I got asked to do was a study of urban taxicabs.
Charlie Haar, a well known Harvard law professor, and Assistant
Secretary of whatever agency preceded HUD, was sitting with my boss in a
bar somewhere in Washington, DC trying to figure out why you could
always get a cab in Washington, DC but you couldn't get a cab anywhere
else. When my boss came home
he called me into his office and said, "Find out why"
So I did what apparently was the first study of taxicabs in
America
when I was 21 or 22 years old.
What I found out is that, with few exceptions, there are no
barriers to entry of taxicabs in Washington--you have to have a drivers
license and a vehicle that isn't totally falling apart and you then you
can be a taxi driver. In contrast, most cities in America seriously
restricted the number of taxis allowed on the street. And the lack of
any real barriers on entry into the taxi market in Washington made a
huge difference in the number of taxis on the street.
Nothing else that we looked at could explain it.
Well, the report got picked up by economists who loved it
because it was empirical proof of classic economic theory. If
you draw a supply and demand curve, and you control the supply below the
demand, you're going to have fewer cabs and higher cost.
So that started my professional and ultimately my academic
career.
Then, while I was, working away happily in
Santa Barbara
, somebody from the predecessor to the
UC Institute for Transportation Studies called me up and said they had
ten traffic safety fellowships available from the Office of Traffic
Safety at HEW (this was the agency which later became NHTSA). They
couldn’t get anybody to take the fellowships because nobody wanted to
do traffic safety but one of my professors, Jack Bollens, thought that
perhaps I might be interested in going on for a PhD.
I said, well gee, yeah, I guess I would.
They told me I could do it at either the Berkeley or UCLA campus
but they didn't guarantee me admission to either school.
Since it's easier to get a PhD at the place you got your
Master's I chose UCLA and moved back to Los Angeles.
I kept working for the company in
Santa Barbara
half time.
With the HEW
funding UCLA brought ten of us together from a number of different
disciplines. There were some
planners and one or two engineers, somebody from the business school,
somebody from the law school and I was in political science.
We went through this 2 year program together and had a
seminar every week on some traffic safety issue.
Some of the seminars were just god awful.
They brought in some statisticians from an insurance company
[laughs] with actuarial tables. I
never heard anything so bad in my life.
And we saw all those California Highway Patrol traffic safety
films, including the famous one with a decapitated head rolling around
on the ground. I think they used the films in traffic safety school for
people who got too many tickets and for other training purposes.
But they were pretty scary; the impact builds because each
film is worse than the last one. And
of course, now we've discovered that isn’t the way you want to do
traffic safety messages because if they are horrific, people turn off
mentally. But I saw a
lot of those. It was an
interesting experience.
So,
was the program aimed at traffic safety at that time?
It took people from
various disciplines and sort of bribed them to do traffic safety related
stuff. They didn't
make me do my dissertation on anything having to do with traffic safety
and in fact I don't think most of the people in the program did.
It was only supposed to be a 2-year program, but the money
went on for at least 3 or 4 years.
Your dissertation was on the
impact of UMTA policy, specifically on the structure and function of
urban transit systems.
Actually, I looked at how UMTA (now FTA) funding policies in the late
60’s affected the decision of individual cities to pursue rail
systems. I looked at that in
Los Angeles
and
San Diego
and with 20 years’ hindsight, I'm not
sure I was right, but I felt that the Feds kept both
Los Angeles
and
San Diego
looking at rail when they might have
encouraged them to do something else. They
just kept paying them to do feasibility studies but they wouldn't pay
them to construct anything. And
I guess the Feds thought that funding studies took the political
pressure off, and that eventually the cities would get tired of
endlessly studying things and lose interest in rail.
But rail systems have fanatic, almost religious, support and
that's not something that goes away.
I'm not a fan of rail systems, but I'm also not a fan of spending
billions of dollars doing all the studies they did.
If they had taken that money and spent it on making public
transit better in
Los Angeles
and
San Diego
, they would have been different cities.
Of course, some of us academics wouldn't have done so well since
a lot of those studies were done by academics or our students.
But even so, I understand why the public is annoyed with this
"let's study the issue" approach.
I
found a very interesting quote in the summary of your dissertation.
You say, "I certainly believe that the
Constitution of the United
States
gives its citizens equal rights to
equal services. And
among those services is sharing mobility," At
that point you were talking about rail transportation.
Oh, I was, but I'm not interested in rail anymore.
I think it is a bad idea. But
I really believe that for many rail advocates it's a religion and you
can't argue with people about religion.
My dissertation was really about the dream of a
rail
system. One of the ironic
things that struck me over the course of doing research for the
dissertation is that the Los Angeles Times totally changed their
editorial policy somewhere right in the middle.
For roughly 25 years they opposed a rail system.
They bought all the arguments (which I think were sensible) that
Los Angeles was too sprawled out for a new rail system to make a
difference, that it was expensive and that there were other ways to meet
the same needs.
And then, all of the sudden, the editorial writers got religion.
Up to that point, the downtown business interests hadn’t been
very interested in rail; suddenly, in the late 60's, early 70's, they
decided it would be a nice idea to revitalize downtown
Los Angeles
by running a rail system in. Once
the business community became supportive of a rail system, the Los
Angeles Times changed its editorial policy almost overnight.
I don't think I recognized how important that was as a real
turning point, not because the LA Times makes so much difference, but
because it reflected a change in the opinion of the power structure in
the city. And the editorials
feed the public who I guess always had fantasies about what rail in Los
Angeles was going to mean.
Some
people probably remembered what it was like in the 20's, and 30's, and
40's.
I heard a lot of,
"I lived in
Brooklyn
, and for a nickel I could go
anywhere." I still hear
that from those folks.
You’ve
also said, in one or two places, something about how a rail system may
have long term impact.
I don’t think rail systems will work in sprawling cities but to be
fair, they might in the long run —at least that’s one argument.
Somebody said it's really unfair to conclude that the failure of
a system of a few miles to attract many riders tells you anything about
what would happen if you had an 80 or 90 mile system. The argument is
that there is a critical mass. I
mean, who would readjust their lives to take a train to go five miles? It's
crazy. But if you could
really get on the system and go anywhere in the city, maybe you'd be
much more likely to choose your home differently or have only one car in
your family instead of two or three.
While I don’t find it compelling, it is a possibility.
That
statement in your dissertation is almost a manifesto for equality in
transportation and a lot of your work subsequently is focused on
different groups and the access they have to mobility.
Right.
This is not just because I came out of the 60's, though that was
a big part of it, but because of what I learned in doing the taxi work. I
had originally thought that rich people took taxis.
Guess what? It's those in
poverty who take taxis because they need a
car, right? Where else can you rent a car in 15-minute increments? It
turns out that it's a very bifurcated market.
Rich business men and poor people.
And that was a real shock to me.
I mean, now it makes sense, but it didn't at the time, and it
actually surprised a lot of people.
Of course, if you were in the business, you knew who your
clientele was. But it was
interesting that analysts and planners all had this view that the taxi
was a rich person's travel mode. That
got me into looking at why it was that all these poor folks were taking
taxis. Then I started
looking into their mobility and I suppose that had I not been a child of
the 60's and cared about all that stuff, I might have pursued another
angle. But I got called to
do this [laughs] and stuck with it.
Maybe that’s the
secret of my success, if I you can say I've been successful.
I've never abandoned the focus on poor people and those
with disadvantages. I found
ways to do research in these areas in the Reagan years when people
weren't interested in funding such research.
During the Reagan years, for example, federal funding agencies
were really hot about privatization and my stuff leads to that.
Taxicabs are privately owned and privately operated.
I was able to use their funding to expand the boundaries so I
could look at a lot of other issues related to privatization.
I
concur in your observations. There
is no reason why the private sector can't solve some of these problems I
imagine a lot of taxi riders are on welfare and have no other way to get
to the grocery store or they were people going to and from bars.
Going to bars was a big
destination when I first began studying taxi ridership patterns. In
1972, I spent a month in
Los Angeles
asking questions of taxi riders. I got
the operators of the largest taxi fleet in
Los Angeles
to let me ride around with the drivers.
The first time I went out on
the 6:00 p.m. to
midnight
shift and I have stories that we
can’t even talk about. But
a lot of people were going to or coming from bars. My guess is that it's
come full circle again and there is even more bar stuff because of the
drinking laws—lots of people are using taxis to go drinking.
They book them in advance because they know that they want to
drink all evening in fancy restaurants and so forth, and nobody wants to
be the designated driver.
Maybe
you can do another taxicab study now.
[Laughs] Somebody has to pay for it before you can do it.
You’ve
studied a lot of groups and some may be impacted more than others in
various ways. But one
finding that I was very intrigued with concerned working
women, especially if they have young children and are more dependent on the
automobile.
I don't know if you looked at the TCPR study that I did concerning
transit markets of the future. The
census asked people their most common mode of transportation to work.
And dividing people by income, it turns out that women who make
under $10,000 are less likely to use public transit than men who make
under $10,000. And women who
make under $15,000 are more likely to drive to work alone than men who
make under $15,000. I think
that men are more likely to be employed in concentrated service
industries or in manufacturing jobs, where they all go in together or
they are going to more concentrated work sites which are easier to serve
with transit. But women are
going to work in Seven-Elevens out in god knows what low density area.
But on top of all of that, the differences between men and women
are also due to having kids.
In my earliest
research, I sort of ignored the structure of the labor market, as if it
had no influence. And I
think it does. But I think
the larger issue that keeps showing up in my work, and in lots of other
people's work now, is that women have the primary responsibility for
childcare and, increasingly, eldercare, and there is no way to do that
without a car.
Now
I know in the other reports you talk about the Transportation Demand
Management research?
They keep changing the name but it means using a variety of strategies
to reduce how much driving people do or how many miles they travel.
But some policies affect women more than men and my early work
for the Department of Labor concluded that certain TDM measures were
likely to be disproportionately hard on women.
It
has affected even the
University
of California, where that philosophy drives some of the
parking policies, for example.
Well, I have never been critical of giving out transit passes or
promoting car pooling, or doing any of those positive things.
I don't think some of them are very effective, but I've never
been critical of measures to promote alternative modes. But some kinds
of measures can and do hurt women. I've
been worried about the punitive stuff like totally removing parking,
forbidding your employees to come to work with a car, high gasoline
taxes, road pricing, pricing formerly free parking.
I think that sort of stuff hits women harder.
I
thought that was a very striking analysis that you published and it
seems directly to the point. Has
that had an impact on policy?
No, my Department
of Labor report got a lot of press, but I doubt it impacted policy. What
happened was that as the various governments started to tighten the
screws on people, they rebelled. Travel
reduction programs began to demand a whole host of things, like ending
free parking on the streets. And
reductions were a moving target—the more single occupant vehicle trips
you reduced one year the more you had to reduce the next year.
Initially the target for some cities or employers wasn’t hard
to achieve--you promoted car pools or gave out transit passes.
But employers and cities had to keep chasing this target, so
after awhile, all the easy stuff got done.
Then you had to start messing with people's lives—banning cars
or parking. But that stuff
hurt people's lives, because many people couldn't do what they needed to
do if they didn't have the car. Women couldn’t pick up their children
at daycare and so forth. So
people started screaming and companies started screaming that they would
lose business and lose employees.
All over the
country governments began to remove the penalties from such programs,
sometimes in dramatic ways. One year Congress took all the money out of
EPA's budget for mandatory travel reduction programs. Over a ten year
period from the middle of the 80’s to the middle of the 90's, many
Federal, state, and local mandatory regulations was made voluntary.
So
in other words, the Transportation Demand Management movement wasn't
effective?
No--the incentives probably helped in some places as did the public
attention to the problems created by cars.
But I still think the regulations affected some people
differentially. There’s a
big difference between positive incentives and penalties or sanctions. It’s
one thing to promote car pooling, or to save the best parking for car
poolers and it's another thing to tell me I can't park here anymore and
I had better find some alternative way to come to work.
How am I going to drop my kids off at the magnet school without a
car; how am I going to get home in the middle of the day to pick up my
kids if they get sick at school or daycare if I came on a bus? Remember
that initially employers were supposed to impose these mandatory
measures on their employees. Well, employers didn't want to do it,
because they were hearing so many complaints from their employees.
And employers started putting pressure on state legislatures and
then on Congress, and so everybody backed off.
So while my research had little impact, the fact that I was
right, that many measures hurt working women and their families,
ultimately led governments to back off.
Of course, if people had been willing to do these things car use
and traffic congestion and environmental pollution would have decreased.
One
could have taken what you wrote and predicted what was going to happen.
Exactly, exactly.
But different kinds of programs can work—and sometimes for the
same reason that penalties didn’t work.
For example,toll roads may be coming back in America—and their
value is that you are not making things any worse for the people who are
already on the highway. But
they offer, for money, an alternative that lets you go faster; either an
entire roadway or one or two lanes right along the freeway which you
have to pay to be in. And
analysts have discovered that there are some fairly low income people
using these kinds of options. Why
are those people willing to pay to go in that lane? Because it's cheaper
than another hour of daycare, or they can get home before
5:30
, when the daycare center charges them a
huge penalty for being late. And
congested traffic has a habit of being erratic.
You know, if you are out in congestion and there is an accident,
you could be sitting there for an hour, and you might miss the deadline
for picking up your kids and have to pay a penalty.
Or you have a second job near your home and you have to get to it
on time every day. Because
these lanes don't tend to have accidents or a lot of congestion, they
are more reliable in terms of knowing how long the trip is going to
take.
I was originally
opposed to road pricing strategies because I thought they were
inequitable and hit women worse than men—both because they were more
likely to be poor and because, if they had kids, they had fewer options.
But the experiences so far suggest that these options are not as
inequitable as I originally assumed.
But they also show that everything I said about people's behavior
is right. And what's
interesting to me is that there is a whole community of people who do
"travel demand" modeling, who ignored these issues for years.
They didn’t recognize at all that there might be differences between
comparable men and women. Then
suddenly in the last decade or so, they’ve started to change their
models to account for travel differences by sex, or size of the family,
or life cycle.
What
about income?
Well, they always
looked at income and employment. But
in essence they treated a 55 year old man and his wife with two
teenagers and a household income of $40,000 the same as a young couple
with two young children and the same income. There was no recognition
that those two young kids in the household were probably more important
than income in predicting behavior. What
really annoys me is that some of the modelers say that the important
variable is not sex but household role.
Yes, it’s true that two 22 year olds each living alone have
roughly the same travel patterns even if one is male and the other
female. But if you drop a
kid into the women’s house…
…it
changes dramatically.
It changes everything. And
if you put them together in the same household with the kid, his travel
patterns are not going to be the same as hers, even if they both have
jobs outside the home. We know that.
So why go to the trouble of creating a ridiculous variable called
"household role," which you can only infer rather than
measure? Some analysts seem to do anything to avoid saying that men and
women really are different and we ought to look at it that way.
Another
possible use of this data is to reflect on cultural change, and who does
what and why they do it.
There's some really
interesting stuff about that.
I actually covered some of that in the TCRP report.
There are people who do use-of-time studies who’ve found that
when you line up comparable men and women they are just not doing the
same thing with their time. Of course, income, and car ownership, and
location in the city are all important. But
almost every study shows that sex is still associated with differences
in travel and other behavior.
This
is a lot of food for research .
Not as much I would
like. I mean, people are
interested in this, so I give talks on the subject.
But I think what's changed public policy is that more and more
young women with children have come into the workforce.
Society can't run without those women but suddenly we are
realizing that they have other obligations.
This society is much less responsive than other developed
countries, that's for sure. It’s funny but sometimes the old
engineering types who have been fighting my research findings for years
come up to me and say "my daughter and her husband, or my son and
daughter-in-law, have this problem." This
is new for them because they either had wives who stayed at home, or
wives who worked part time, or wives who didn't start working until the
kids were gone. So it's a
generational change for the guys who are in power who suddenly realize
that they have secretaries who have to go home for the kids, or leave at
4 o'clock
to pick their kids up. I
don't think the research actually changed anything, but I think people,
with their demands on the system, changed it.
Not enough, but some.
This
is an interesting phenomenon that women are now necessary for the
workforce, but still retain the child-bearing and child rearing roles.
There is a woman in the School of
Social
Welfare
who did a study which pointed out that one of the problems in the
suburbs is that not only are men gone
during the day, but the women are gone as well.
So there is no longer a kind of an interacting culture in
suburban neighborhoods and the work place has become the center for
those women.
Well, in the 50’s and 60’s, when a lot of the suburban wives weren't
in the paid labor force, there were people who argued that there was no
culture out there anyway. There’s
always been a lot of suburb-bashing, as if living in the central city
was paradise. I bet that if you asked a bunch of people in
Berkeley
who live at very high densities where
their friends lived, you would find that they made their friends at work
or at a church or mosque or synagogue, not so much in their
neighborhoods. You can't
control who moves into your neighborhood.
So there is no reason to assume you are going to have a culture
of neighbors.
You
have also done a lot of work on the elderly.
Many of whom are women.
And that's not going away, in spite of the fact that we are all
living longer. At first the
pundits said that if women were going to act like men, they were going
to die faster. And they are
not. The mortality gap
between men and women is still there—so most old people will be women.
It’s
clear from your work that elderly people already drive a lot by
themselves or they depend on someone else’s private automobile.
A very small percentage of their transportation is mass transit,
or even paratransit. From
your argument, it appears that this amount is going to increase.
Now, one observation is that as people get older, they drive
less. But, there is also
some hint in what you've done that people in our generation, for
example, are going to be less likely to reduce their driving.
Do you see that as a trend?
Guessing the future is always tough.
One way to do it is to look at people who are 50 and 60 now and
just assume that when they are 70 they are going to look like they’re
50. It's easy to imagine
that people who have lived their whole lives dependant on the car are
going to stay dependant on the car as long as they can.
People in our generation are going to drive more after retirement
than people who are currently retired.
And I don't see anything turning that around.
I also think it's sort of pointless to talk about transit and
walking, and all of those things, as if they were going to get us out
of, let’s say, the crash problems created by older drivers.
This is not to say that we shouldn't have better pedestrian
facilities, and better public transit, and better options for older
people. All of that we
should do. But that's only
going to nibble at the margin. Most
people are going to continue to drive even when they are not good
drivers. They are going to
delude themselves.
I do a lot of focus
group work and sometimes the responses are hysterical.
Older people are harder on other older people than we are.
They will sit around and bitch about all the people they know who
shouldn't be driving, and about how those people should be taken off the
road. But they don't ever
perceive that they might be talking about themselves.
And maybe they are not-- any individual older driver can be a
better driver than any of us. But
it can't be true that all the people I'm talking to in focus groups are
better than average drivers. So
some of these people who are complaining that other older people are bad
drivers – but they are not –must be bad drivers and not know it.
There is going to be a lot of denial.
And we haven't even talked about Alzheimer's and senile dementia.
This is going to be a huge problem.
There are people who think that the senile dementia issue is
going to be much worse than that of physical problems, because if your
eyesight is bad, or you don't feel well, or you can't see around things,
you tend to limit yourself. With
Alzheimer's, you don't know to limit yourself.
In
a number of your papers you review different solutions like paratransit
and increased mass transit and you generally conclude that these are not
going to be the panacea.
There is no
panacea. But the public
doesn't know that, and politicians don't know that.
Well, politicians may know it, but they know it's easier to
pretend there is. They will
be out of office by the time it turns out that it doesn't work.
In
one of your recent articles you mention the concept of a sustainable
community. In fact, you keep
coming back to the idea that with different kinds of land use planning,
a sustainable community would be the ideal direction to go, or maybe the
panacea. However, you
appear to be pessimistic about getting there.
I don't believe in the trickle-down theory -- that anything we do to
make a community more accessible will be good for the elderly.
I thing we need to design and redesign communities thinking about
the elderly first and not last. That means we have to have better
pedestrian support and transit options geared to the needs of older
people. For example,
communities that didn't build sidewalks because they thought they
didn’t look good or were too expensive, I think those folks ought to
put sidewalks back in. And I
think we ought to give older folks more travel options. But lets face
reality-- there are going to be 80 million older Americans by the middle
of this century. And most of them are going to be driving.
So, let's say you take half of them off the road (which is not at
all realistic) with paratransit or other alternatives, you still have
horrendous numbers of older people with a broad mix of driver skills.
You've got to deal with that.
I
really agree with you. Is
there, on the other hand, a way to use this phenomenon as leverage for
building better communities?
Well I hope so.
But I’m upset by the focus of lot of those discussions. In lots
of discussions of neotraditional communities, denser communities and so
forth, people say that if we can redesign every metropolitan area in
America
older people will be better off, too.
It's the trickle-down theory.
Well, the trickle-down theory doesn't work.
That's just Reaganomics. If
I let the needs of older folks be subsumed by this craze for neo-urban,
neotraditional, new urbanist communities, the plight facing older folks
is going to get worse and worse. I'd
rather say there is tremendous evidence that the elderly will move if we
provide them with better designed communities near their current friends
and family. . In other
developed countries lots and lots of older people move after retirement.
Why? Because there is someplace to go.
Of course, some older people move across the country to seaports
and traditional retirement communities. But, a lot of them just move in
the same community because they have a wide range of housing types and
you can't do that in America.
People say, oh, well, those elderly couples are rich because they’re
sitting in a $500,000, 2200 square feet home.
But if they sell that house and try to buy something smaller,
more appropriate for their age what can they buy in their own
neighborhood? Another 2200 square foot house.
I really do think that some of the other ideals of a higher
densityneotraditional community would work if we gear it only at the
elderly. I mean, skip the
part about remaking what a metropolitan area looks like.
At a minimum that's going to take you 50 years.
Why don't we take some of those suburban neighborhoods where
people have been aging since the second World War, and talk about doing
a little bit of high density development right in the middle of them?
I like the model provided by Rancho Santa Margarita, in
Orange
County where the developer put in
several senior facilities right next to the commercial part of the
neotraditional development. So
older folks can just walk across the street to have coffee or go grocery
shopping. I'd like to see
much more of that. I don't
think young people with children who want a backyard, are going to start
moving into these units. Nobody
who can afford 2200 square feet is going to move into 900 square feet in
a high-rise tower just because neotraditionalists think they should.
But older people might if we gave them the options, and we have
some hints that that might work.
My favorite story
is about a traditional orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Cincinnati with
synagogues, kosher butcher shops, and things that cater to those folks.
A Jewish nursing home chain decided to build a retirement home in
the middle of this neighborhood, because all the stuff the people they
were marketing to would need was right there. They assumed their
residents would come from a five state area. To their surprise most of
the people who moved in were from the immediate neighborhood. Why? Because
they wanted to stay in their neighborhood but not in their large homes.
They wanted the same synagogue, and the same friends, and the same
butcher. But until that was
built, they had no choices, so they stayed in their houses.
We talk about the elderly being over-housed because their houses
are too big for their current needs.
Yet people stay in those houses because they want all the other
amenities of their current neighborhood and they don't see any other way
to get them. In this case
there were no other choices in the neighborhood.
But the minute some of those people in Cincinnati were given a
more appropriate choice that didn’t take them out of the neighborhood
they flocked to it.
So,
in other words, instead of thinking about a panacea, we need to do what
we can in the context of where we are.
Well that’s only part of my
approach. I think we have to
first find out what any strategy does for the elderly; if other people
decide that such features are attractive and they want to live there
too, fine. But my primary
goal, and the way I judge a strategy, is how well its meets the needs of
older people. And we have to recognize that some older people who live
across the street from the grocery store who think they are capable of
driving, may still drive across the street or, more likely, to a
different grocery story. But they can walk if they want to, which is the
point, and we can offer other options, like community buses even for
very short distances. There
is a lot of evidence that these small buses are actually quite
attractive to the elderly. They
run very slowly, with a lot of personalized service from the driver.
That’s what I've spent the last few years working on and I
think that’s going to be my approach for the rest of my career.
This
overall approach of rebuilding, beginning where we are, and not working
toward some grand redesign is very interesting.
Well, you know what
they say, "perfect is the enemy of good." We are looking for
this perfect city and we're not going to find it.
People don't understand how cities work.
We have this belief that older people are willing to move, but in
fact, that's not true, the vast majority of older Americans don’t move
and the numbers are declining. I
know this sounds like I’m contradicting my own suggestions but I think
that older people don’t move because they are committed to their
communities but not necessarily their homes.
They might be willing to move from one kind of home to a smaller
one at higher density closer to shops and other things within the same
community or neighborhood —but they simply don’t have those options
now.
That’s
very interesting. I
didn't know that until I read one of your reports.
Well look at the 2000 data. The
mobility rate of older people—that is, the percentage who move
home—has been steadily declining for decades. Unfortunately,
gerontologists and housing planners and transportation planners all use
the term mobility differently. Gerontologists
use mobility to mean can you get from one side of the room to the other.
This is very different from the transportation person's
definition of mobility. And
housing planners use mobility to mean a move from one house to another.
If
people move, they usually move to the next census tract.
That’s true. They do not
move to Arizona or Florida in mass numbers.
Which means that if people want to stay in their neighborhoods,
why don't we give them some choices in their neighborhoods?
Obviously,
our focus here at Berkeley is traffic safety.
How do you view the issue of mobility as related to safety?
There was a major
National Research Council conference in Washington in 1999 which
examined these issues. One of the things we talked about was the need
for a greater mix of safety and mobility.
For too long safety experts have focused only on regulating older
drivers off the road to increase safety.
But that approach is being challenged.
It's hard enough to figure out who the unsafe drivers are and get
them to stop driving. It’s going to cost a fortune to get more than a
small percentage of them to stop driving by increasing restrictions or
hiding cops behind billboards. One
thing we know about the elderly is that, as a group, those who don't
have dementia – and that's most of them of course – are very, very
responsible people. They are
law abiding and when they break the law, it's by accident.
When they have crashes, for example, it's not because they were
speeding or violating the law. They
may have broken a law, but it's not because they were risk takers, it's
because they couldn't see or they misjudged how close they were to the
car in front of them. So having more restrictions may not help.
I think that a major way to increase safety is to give older
drivers options for mobility, because a lot of them will know in their
heart that they shouldn't be driving and they will take some of those
options. I genuinely believe
that.
I think more and
more the traffic safety community is recognizing that you can talk about
harder tests and stricter rules and stricter licensing, but you also
have to be realistic and talk about mobility options for people whose
licenses you take away.
So
the key here is having options for people, other ways for them to meet
their transportation needs.
Absolutely. I think that approach is slowly being adopted in the traffic
safety community. Instead of
people saying thatolder drivers are bad guys, and how irrational for
them to continue driving when they know they shouldn’t, I say it's
perfectly rational for them to continue driving.
How are they going to get their groceries, how are they going to
lead a life? It's irrational to assume they are irrational.
They are very rational, they are looking at their lives and they
are saying, in some sense – not explicitly, but in some sense –
I’d rather take the increased risk of the car crash than sit in my
home for three weeks without getting out.
I'd rather take the risk of a car crash than calling up my
daughter yet again and asking her to bring me groceries or take me to
the store. I'd rather take
the risk of the crash than not seeing my friends or not going to church.
That's what they are implicitly doing, and that's rational.
There
are a number of task forces in California, that are looking at the
elderly driver.
I've heard about them, but I don't know what you found.
We
haven't found anything yet, but the focus has been on things like
licensure and physical disability that impact on driving.
But from what you are saying, it might be more important to not
just measure people's physical ability to drive, but to assess their
transportation needs and how they are going to meet these needs.
There is actually very little relationship between testing or what you
find in the laboratory, and someone's crash rates.
And we don't fully understand that.
Except
for maybe extreme conditions.
True. But we don't even know
the full story in extreme physical conditions.
We see a lot of cases of people with dementia who have a partner
and who practice what we call co-driving.
He has dementia but there is nothing physically wrong with
him; she has physical problems but no mental ones.
So they both get in the car, he drives and she says, go down to
the corner, turn right and he does.
The problem is when he's wandering around alone.
But you know, there is very little to link dementia to crash
rates. It's just that we
know that there are going to be more and more people with dementia—and
increasingly they won't have somebody in the seat next to them.
And current tests
are pretty far off the mark—they don’t predict crash rates because
they’re not measuring the right things. Sure, when you have stricter
and stricter rules, some people stop driving.
Some people fail the test or decide not to take it, but, overall,
there is no evidence that this has an appreciable impact on the crash
rates. In fact, very few people fail those tests, you know.
There are differential state rates, but it's probably around 10%
who fail overall. So let's say you go in and you don't fail, then you
say to yourself, hell, I'm a great driver! Well, the problem is there is
no relationship between what they are testing for and the crash
experience of older people. Now we've sent these people out on the
streets who think they are really good drivers, and they are terrible
drivers. Current tests are just not catching the right people.
Sounds
like one part of this strategy might be to identify ways in which people
meet their transportation needs, and try to enhance those.
Yes! And you have to have both
the carrot and the stick, I admit that. There are people out there who
shouldn't be driving. But I honestly believe that if we had better
options for older people, they'd drive less.
Now they aren't all going to say, "Okay, I'm giving up,
you're right. There is a
little bus that comes around my house three times a day, I'm giving up
my car." But overall
older people who have other options will drive less.
And as you reduce their exposure rate, you are going to reduce
the crashes. We have to do
something. Eighty million
older drivers out there? Plus
all those bad teenager drivers. What
are we going to do? It's not going to be safe to be out there.
Thank
you very much.
Interviewed
by David Ragland, Director,
Traffic
Safety Center
Berkeley, CA
April 2, 2001
Transcribed
by Willitte Herman
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