If you drive a car and you’re 70 or over, the good news is that some classroom instruction and behind-the-wheel training can improve your driving performance. This should help to prolong your years of safe driving, and your independence.

The bad news is that if don’t know when to quit, people who care about you, and maybe even the police, will have the job of persuading you to give up your car keys.

In a study by a team of experts in geriatrics, 126 drivers aged 70 or older underwent two four-hour classroom sessions and two one-hour on-road sessions concentrating on common problems of older drivers. The study was published in The Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, in 2007.

Participants’ skills were assessed in common problem areas including scanning side and rear views, backing up, making left turns, changing lanes, and regulating speed, as well as the use of seat belts, side and rear view mirrors, and turn signals. The education program enhanced the participants’ performance on knowledge and on-road tests. For the rest of us, there are driver refreshment courses.

And common sense.

It seems that night vision starts to weaken at the age of 40. If by the time we’re 70, we don’t see clearly in the dusk and dark, and headlights from other vehicles make it hard for us to see, we give up driving at night.

We check our medications to see which ones we should not take before driving, and we school ourselves to stop for breaks whenever we get drowsy at the wheel.

We make sure, one way or another, that our hearing is good enough to hear other cars and train whistles and horns.

We make sure that arthritis (or injury) has not made it impossible for us to turn our heads sufficiently to see well out the side of the car and in the rear, especially when we are backing up.

We check the rear-view and side mirrors before we start a drive, and we remember to put on our seatbelts.

We check the rear and look over our shoulder at blind spots and we signal before making turns.

So far so good, if we can do all that. We would do well to limit ourselves, though, to short trips if we get confused at complicated intersections or find it hard to decide when to join traffic on a busy interstate highway, or are uncomfortable keeping up to the speed limit.

We would also do well to stay off highways if we feel nervous or fearful when being passed by a large truck or other large vehicle. My father used to drive our family from Philadelphia to Atlantic City when my brother, sister and I were kids. He told me years later that whenever a large truck passed him on one of those drives, he would close his eyes.

There are some issues that we may not be able to handle.

If we have difficulty moving our legs so that we can't get our foot on the right pedal in timely fashion, or we simply can't turn our head around to see properly out the side or in the rear – well, then, best to turn over those keys.

Or if we get drowsy a lot of the time behind the wheel or our thoughts wander, or we sometimes forget where we’re going, or we get short of breath or experience periods of sudden weakness or dizziness while driving, or we’ve had a stroke or are subject to seizures – best to turn over those keys.

We may also want to turn over those keys if we have diabetes or heart disease, or, at least, check with our doctor about it.

In her blog in The New York Times, “The New Old Age: Caring and Coping,” Jane Gross discussed the problem of persuading elderly parents to give up driving (“The Car Key Conversation,” July 3, 2008). The “car key conversation,” according to Ms. Gross, is the one that caregivers dread most.

Common sense might head off that conversation, and worse eventualities, if we take steps to keep our driving skills up to snuff, monitor our performance, and consider with a clear eye how steep the decline has become in our declining years. We will know, without having to be cajoled, told, or ordered, that it’s time to find other ways of getting around.

For starters, if you'd like to test your "Driving IQ" on the AARP web site, click on www.aarp.org/families/driver_safety/driver_ed/a2004-06-23-drivingiq.html.

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