Misjudging their own steps: Why elderly people have trouble crossing the road

Objective: The aim of this study was to test whether elderly individuals underestimate the time that it will take them to cross a street by comparing estimated with actual road-crossing time. Background: In many developed countries, elderly people are overrepresented among pedestrian fatalities from motor vehicle accidents. There is surely more than one contributing factor to this phenomenon, and many have been offered. We propose that one additional factor may be that although older people are consciously aware that they no longer walk at the same pace as they once did, they do not take this fact into consideration when planning a street crossing. Method: We compared the ability of young and old pedestrians to estimate the time that it will take them to cross a street, using both prospective and retrospective time estimation. Results: A significant interaction was found between age group and crossing time. Among elderly participants, actual crossing times were significantly longer than both their precrossing estimation and their postcrossing estimation, which did not significantly differ from each other. In contrast, the undergraduate group’s crossing times did not display a significant difference across measurements. Conclusion: This study implies that even if older pedestrians correctly evaluate the road situation, they may nonetheless endanger themselves by underestimating the time that it will take them to cross the street. We suggest that minimizing this effect could be accomplished by educating seniors to the fact that they are not as fast as they once were and that this fact needs to be factored in to street-crossing decisions.