This story from the New York Times has had a lot of play on the transportation blogs and sites – and no wonder: When Planning for Retirement, Consider Transportation
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During retirement planning, transportation is often an afterthought. Yet, figuring transportation into plans is essential, experts say.
According to the American Journal of Public Health, Americans are outliving their ability to drive safely — a woman, on average, by 10 years, a man by seven. Over all, the ability to drive safely as one ages depends on health. Some people can drive into their 90s while others begin to cut back at 65.
“When people make retirement plans, they make no transportation plans because they assume they’re going to drive forever,” said Katherine Freund, founder and president of the Independent Transportation Network, a nonprofit organization that provides rides for older adults, with 27 affiliates throughout the country. Nationally, for those over 65, 2 to 3 percent of what distance they travel is on public transportation, 8 percent on foot and the rest by car, Ms. Freund said. …
When planning ahead, think about whether you prefer to stay in your community, plan to downsize or will relocate. According to a 2014 AARP study, by age 65 and older, 87 percent of people want to remain in their current community as they age. Financial and family considerations play a role in decisions about where to live.
“If you’re 55, you have to project out into the future,” Ms. Bonilla said. …
Transportation is the second highest household expense after housing, according the Office of Planning, Environment and Realty, which is part of the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration.
Those living in households that are car-dependent spend 25 percent of income on transportation. By living closer to work, shopping, restaurants and other amenities, households can reduce transportation costs to 9 percent of their total income. …
Potentially filling the void are a number of new transportation services that provide rides for a fee, including Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. Some senior housing communities have shuttle buses that take residents to medical appointments; each one is different, so it is important to check when you are considering places to live.
Whatever decision you make about where to live and transportation, here are some guidelines from experts:
ANALYZE your current neighborhood in terms of where you typically need and want to go, and determine how you might reach those places if you weren’t driving. Include leisure activities like classes, entertainment and simply meeting friends. “Think about how you’re going to do that when you can no longer drive,” Ms. Bonilla said. “Lay out a grid and see how far these trips are from your home. That will determine where you live, whether you stay in your home.”
It makes one wince when people talk about retiring in a rural area with a lot of acreage around them, etc. and car is the only way to get around. That’s great, maybe for another 10-15 yrs.
Or less.
A colleague just took early retirement. She’s around 60. She bought a house in a town of 2,000 people almost 75 km. outside of Calgary. Cheaper housing. Great. New house, just built. 3 stories. Her knees have been hurting for past 4 years. Now she has tinnitus. No cure for that.
She is single and lives alone in a brand new development. There’s no transit in her area at all.
Thank you for bringing this topic up.
My mother lost her independence in 2003 and has required top-of-the-line care ever since. One day her church bought her an electric wheelchair (I suppose there should be a payback after 30+ years of paying tithes) and it was quite liberating over the next decade.
The most serious limitations to her mobility remain the deeply suburban location of her care facility in Calgary, a city that must still undergo light years of evolution despite relatively successful ridership rates on its C-Train network. Its HandiBus service is inconvenient at best, excruciating at worst, and she has stopped using it due to its inadequacies dealing with long milk runs through excessively sprawling subdivisions. Snow on the sidewalks and streets is a transportation killer to octogenarians – with or without electric wheelchairs — and perhaps the majority of them stay cooped up all winter, even on nice days.
It all gets down to measuring urban accessibility. There she is, 530m from a light rail station, yet it might as well be on Mars due to its inaccessibility from the surrounding neighbourhood even on the finest summer day. One of the profound lessons Calgary is just beginning to learn is to bring the light rail system to where people live, work and shop. Decades of experience should have taught transportation planners and urbanists there to stop placing LRT on the most convenient and cheapest freight rail corridors or in the centre median of major roaring arterial corridors isolated blocks distant from jobs and homes.
In an ideal world my mother’s care facility could have been built in a mid-rise at Chinook Centre, a suburban mall encompassed by hundreds of acres of open tarmac screaming for high-density development and a direct rapid transit link if there ever was one. (The current Chinook Station is located on the CPR corridor in an industrial park 440m from the Centre with its thousands of jobs. The potential reminds me of Vancouver’s Oakridge.) How satisfying it would be if a disabled octogenarian grandmother could access a couple of kilometres of “indoor streets” in the Centre and then the entire city via a universally accessible rapid transit system simply by pressing an elevator button.
It is very painful for an urbanist to see a disabled loved one being denied access to her family, social network and community outside of the care facility simply because the community was suckered into building a city for cars instead of humans. The widely-accepted suffering imposed on the mobility-challenged in our cities should become a matter of human rights sooner or later.
My parents act like they’re going to be able to drive forever. Luckily they live in Vancouver within electric scooter range of shops, services and more than one bus regular bus route. My in-laws, on the other hand, have things much worse. Not only have they already lost their licences, they live in a suburban neighbourhood where there’s nothing but housing for a couple of miles in every direction and a hill that would kill a scooter’s battery long before they could get anywhere. Transit is about 400m away along a quiet, flat street but the bus comes by just once an hour outside peak periods. They are now dependent on their live-in care giver for tasks they could otherwise accomplish on their own.