How Old Is Too Old To Drive?

In politics, there are plenty of "third-rail" topics that candidates try to avoid. Many of those issues are hugely important to one major demographic: senior citizens.

But older voters aren't just concerned with Social Security and Medicare. They're also worried about personal freedom and independence -- symbolized, in part, by their right to drive.

Earlier this year, AAA conducted a study of drivers 65 and older. And a whopping 89% said thatlosing their driver's license would be a huge problem. Many had begun curtailing their driving to reduce the possibility of accidents and ensure those licenses stay in their pockets.

But Margaret Dunning of Plymouth, Michigandoesn't seem to worry about such things. At 102, she still drives regularly, and she still changes her own oil. Perhaps most impressively, she does so with an 82-year-old car that she's owned for 63 years.

Dunning was born in 1910, and her favorite car, a 1930 Packard 740 Roadster, followed 20 years later. She got her driver's license at the age of 12, and apart from a few fender-benders, most of her troubles with Johnny 5-0 have been because of speeding. "I have lead in my feet," she says.

It's not unusual to see owners like Dunning maintaining older cars, but finding active drivers who remember the Roaring '20s seems a bit out of the ordinary.

However, Dunning may not be such an oddball down the line. Life expectancy rates continue to increase in the U.S. (PDF), and most drivers will continue getting behind the wheel long after their AARP card arrives in the mail. Some insist that older drivers are safer now than they once were, but not all will be able to grow old gracefully as Dunning has.

Have you discussed matters like these with your older family members? Do you have a plan in place -- a well-defined set of criteria that could force that family member to surrender his or her driver's license? And how do you plan to accommodate his/her travel needs once that license is gone? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Courtesy: The Car Connection

Garamond Vs. Arial: Fonts Can Increase Your Risk Of Crashing

Design fanatics spend a lot of time obsessing over fonts. They debate the readability of Times Roman, the 20th-century functionalism of Helvetica, the low-level IQ of Comic Sans. (Which has generated a hilariously profane response from Comic Sans itself.) 

But discussion of typefaces is more than an academic exercise. From stop signs to newspapers, fonts affect the way that humans read and understand information.

So, we weren't especially surprised to learn that researchers at Monotype Imaging and MIT's AgeLab have determined that typefaces employed by automakers on gauges and telematics screens have a direct effect on driver safety.

The study

To gather their results, MIT and Monotype scientists put 42 people in a driving simulator. Participants ranged in age from 36 and 75 years old; half were men, half were women.

During the simulations, researchers measured the time that their human guinea pigs looked away from the road while checking the navigation screen for directions. Then, the Monotype/MIT team changed the font on the screen and asked each participant to take another drive in the test vehicle.

On one test drive, researchers set the touchscreen to use Eurostile, a "square grotesque" font. The other typeface was Frutiger, which falls in the family of "humanist" fonts.

Grotesques -- square or otherwise -- are popular among automakers because they have a consistent, modern, timeless look. Think of two of the most popular grotesques, Helvetica and its low-rent imitator, Arial: both are clean and simple, without much variation in thickness. Humanist fonts, on the other hand, can taper, and they often offer more variance between upper-case and lower-case letters.

Of the two, humanist fonts are typically considered easier to read because there's more differentiation in the letters -- and that's exactly what researchers found.

In fact, male test subjects had to spend 12% longer reading the square grotesque font than the humanist font. (For reasons yet to be explained, the gap was minimal among women.) At highway speeds, that 12% translates to a difference of 50 feet of roadway -- which, in turn, could be the difference between a safe trip home and a visit to the emergency room. 

Confused by all that font talk? Have a look at this video clip, which explains the study in more detail (or check out a PDF from MIT here):

Could changing the font on our touchscreens cut back on traffic accidents? This study -- and another that verified its findings -- seem to indicate that's the case. (No pun intended.) 

Font fiends, weigh in below.