In the past couple of days, you might have read that Australians aged 50 and over could soon be subjected to mandatory driving lessons.

According to news.com.au, the recommendation for mandated lessons “has surfaced in a new study which is set to spark major debate”.

The news has spread across the world and was also reported in the New York Post.

There’s a problem here, though. The authors are not recommending mandatory lessons for middle-aged drivers, or anybody.

The actual study investigated the driving ability, before and after lessons, of participants aged over 65 – and whether targeted driving lessons could correct a lifetime of bad habits.

Also, the researchers in question, from the University of NSW, are yet to write up their results.

So, what about 50 year olds?

The researchers, from the Neuroscience Research Australia, affiliated with UNSW, this week launched an advice website for older drivers – Ageing Well on the Road.

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Lead investigator Professor Kaarin Anstey, an expert in cognitive ageing, would like to see improving driving skills for older drivers “become an accepted part of our driving lives”.

She said: “The idea is that we need to put some effort into improving our driving and maintaining our skills, and it shouldn’t be stigmatised at all.

“It could be something like, when you turn 50 you’re invited to have an extra driving lesson just to check in on your driving.

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“At the moment you’d only get that if you had something wrong with your driving. It would be better to make it a normal part of life.”

Refresher course

In other words, the professor was suggesting that maybe people aged 50 could volunteer to take part in a refresher lesson program to see if they’ve developed bad habits.

“We know that older drivers have higher rates of crashes than middle-aged drivers,” Professor Anstey said, in a prepared statement.

“And we see an uptick of crashes particularly in the over-80s. But until recently, the way that has been managed is through regulation, in licence removal, which is basically an all-or-nothing approach.”

She said that for some older drivers, “they got their licence when they were 16 and they tell you they learned to drive in a paddock”.

And now, she said, “the driving environments have completely changed, cars have changed, and they’ve never done any refresher courses”.

The new research

Anstey’s team recently completed a randomised controlled trial of older drivers “to see whether driving skills can be improved despite the physical and cognitive challenges of old age”.

After all, “old age brings with it some physical and cognitive declines that may impact driving performance, such as slower reflexes, a shrinking peripheral vision and a reduced capacity to react to fast-moving and changing conditions”.

In the trial, drivers over 65 were put into three groups:

• The first did a road rules refresher course, which functioned as the control in the experiment
• The second group was videoed as they drove. One camera pointed outwards to the road and one was trained on the driver. At the end of the drive, participants were played back any errors they made
• The third group got the video feedback and lessons tailored to focus on their errors.

The researchers followed the drivers in the three groups after 12 months to see if their driving improved.

The results haven’t been analysed yet because the final assessment was only recently completed.

However in a pilot study, “a significant proportion” of participants given driving lessons and video feedback graduated from unsafe to safe drivers.

“And we reduced their driving errors,” Anstey said.

Common errors specific to older drivers

The researchers saw “a similar range of errors made by older drivers in the study”.

But not all driving mistakes identified were necessarily due to the effects of old age.

“A lot of these are just bad habits that drivers have brought with them from their younger years,” Anstey said.

“We see a lot of people not checking blind spots, not taking right hand turns properly, cutting corners, or not maintaining their lane position,” she said.

In the study, she said, “drivers get to practise the errors, which I think is quite powerful”.

They’re not just being told what they’re doing wrong and what not to do.

“They’re actually getting a chance to learn to do it the right way,” she said.