Who wants to drive forever? Exploring attitudes toward driving and aging

The process of driving cessation typically begins when individuals lose the physical and cognitive abilities to safely operate a car as they age, eventually ceasing to drive entirely. But driving cessation can also occur at any age as a result of injuries or disabilities. Regardless of one's age, losing the ability to drive safely has serious implications for road safety and access to vital services. This research explores attitudes around driving, aging, and driving cessation. We identify correlations between personal characteristics, the place in which one lives, and one's attitudes with the desire to continue driving throughout one's life. We do so using survey data from a mail survey conducted in the Midwestern US joined with built environment characteristics for analysis. We first identify four attitudinal factors using principal components analysis: auto-dependent lifestyle, reducing auto -dependence, auto-as-identity, and reluctant auto-dependence (i.e., reliant on a car for transport, despite a desire to the contrary). We then demonstrate through stepwise linear regression that the desire to continue driving as one ages is significantly correlated with pro-car attitudes, youth, and residential density. Alternately, reluctant auto-dependence and increasing age are associated with reduced desires to continue driving as one ages. Attitudes - both pro-car and anti-car-dependence - explain the majority of the variance in the outcome. This work suggests that policy-makers may find popular support across generations to address driving cessation, and in so doing, address auto-dependence for all of society.