Joel Rose

I talked to a lawmaker in Illinois named Jeff Kiker.

He is a Republican state representative there.

Illinois, by the way, has some of, if not the strictest, relicensing rules in the country.

It's the only state that requires older drivers to take a behind-the-wheel test in their 70s.

Kiker is a co-sponsor of a new law that will loosen that restriction there starting this summer.

And the reality is that in many parts of the U.S., older adults do not have good alternatives to driving.

This is especially true, right, in rural areas where public transit and ride-sharing are not viable for most people.

But even in a lot of suburban America, giving up your license means losing a huge amount of independence.

It's complicated.

If you look at crash rates for older drivers, they have generally been falling for the last 25 years.

I talked about this with Anne Dickerson.

She is a professor of occupational therapy and an expert on older drivers at East Carolina University.

And Dickerson says it's hard to put an exact age on when older drivers should have to face additional testing to renew their licenses because Americans are just living longer and aging better than ever before.

But if you compare older drivers to everyone else on the road, you get a different picture.

Younger drivers are the most risky, by far.

Teenagers, even people in their 20s, those are the riskiest drivers.

Drivers from 30 to 80 are the safest.

But when you get to 80 and above,

those crash rates do start to climb again.

How has that gone?