Devise measures for accidents by older drivers

Nine died and six were injured after a car jammed into a sidewalk near Seoul City Hall Monday night. The accident took place in a bustling downtown area where employees were on their way home after dinner. The victims included bankers celebrating a promotion, Seoul City government employees who recently won merit awards and even parking staff of a nearby hospital. But the lead-up to the accident is bizarre in many ways.

A sedan driving out of the Westin Chosun Hotel’s underground parking lot suddenly accelerated and drove backward on a one-way street to run into a number of vehicles, motorcycles and finally pedestrians on the sidewalk. The car raced backwards over 200 meters on the nine-lane Sejong-daero street before it crashed near Deoksu Palace.

It was confirmed that the driver behind the wheel works as a bus driver for a bus company in Gyeonggi. The 68-year-old man had been a career driver steering city buses and trailers for more than 40 years. He tested negative for alcohol or drugs. The driver claims that the car felt strange from the moment he started to drive and that his brake didn’t work at the time. But experts question if the accident was caused by sudden unintended acceleration (SUA), as the car stopped smoothly at the end, as seen in CCTV footage.

Car experts say that typical cases of SUA are stopped after crashing into a building or a vehicle or overturning. But the chance, nevertheless, cannot be overlooked since an automatic mechanism could have been reset upon collision. We would have to wait for the results of the investigations by the police and the National Forensic Service.

Another question is why the driver did not maneuver even while driving backwards. A driver should panic and swerve left and right to avoid bumping into another vehicle or people, but such attempts could not be identified in the CCTV or the car’s black box footage. The driver, currently under hospital treatment for his fractured ribs, must be able to answer to these questions.

Some people are already calling for an old-age restriction on driving. The current law defines 65 as the starting age of the elderly. But given the longer longevity trend, it is also hard to judge that driving is difficult at the age of 68. A rush to limit old-age driving solely based on age without respecting the older population’s rights to drive cannot be a fundamental solution. Nevertheless, as traffic accidents involving senior citizens are clearly on the rise, the government needs to find more comprehensive measures to solve the dilemma if we do not want to see such terrible accidents in the future.