CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Older Drivers and Road Tests

NARRATOR: For many older people, a set of car keys stands for far more than a way to get around. It means doing the shopping without asking favours, visits to the doctor kept on time, and the quiet dignity of coming and going as one pleases. That is exactly why one proposal now floated by road-safety officials has provoked such heated reactions: once a driver turns eighty, the idea goes, a licence should be renewed only after a fresh road test, with an examiner in the passenger seat.

NARRATOR: Helena Strand, a researcher who studies collision data, thinks the idea is long overdue. Reaction time, peripheral vision and the capacity to judge oncoming traffic, she argues, deteriorate so gradually that drivers themselves rarely register the change. Too often, she says, a family knows for a year or more that something is wrong and says nothing at all. Several provinces already rely on vision screening or a physician's report, but in Strand's view those safeguards are flimsy. A family doctor who has treated a patient for twenty years is understandably reluctant to deliver news that could end that patient's independence. An examiner, by contrast, has no relationship to protect. A single drive around the block will never reveal everything, of course, yet it remains, in her view, the only assessment that actually watches someone drive.

NARRATOR: Arthur Penner, who speaks for a seniors' advocacy coalition, finds the proposal both insulting and misdirected. Age, he contends, is a remarkably blunt instrument: a healthy eighty-three-year-old may drive far more cautiously than a distracted twenty-five-year-old, yet only one of them would be summoned for an examination. Penner points to figures showing that drivers over eighty are involved in fairly few collisions per licence holder. That statistic flatters them somewhat, since many already avoid highways, rush hour and night driving, and per kilometre travelled, their record looks a good deal less reassuring. Penner, however, regards that very restraint as evidence that older drivers manage their limitations sensibly. In small rural towns without buses or taxis, he warns, a failed test can mean isolation, missed appointments and a sharp decline in wellbeing.

NARRATOR: His alternative is targeted assessment, triggered by a collision, a police officer's observation or a worried relative, combined with restricted licences permitting, say, daytime driving within a familiar radius. It is an appealing compromise, and arguably a fairer one. Its weakness is that it depends on someone noticing a problem and being willing to speak up, which is the very hesitation Strand found among doctors and families. A system that waits for warning signs may, in the end, be waiting for the first serious crash.