Older drivers in Berkeley have caused several fatal crashes. Is the city doing enough?
The drivers in Berkeley's last three fatal pedestrian collisions were 79, 85 and 87 years old.
By Liz Fox
An hour before sunset one evening last November, a Berkeley police officer pulled over a car traveling in the wrong direction on a divided road.
The officer issued a verbal warning to the driver. She was 100 years old.
No one was injured that night. But the drivers in Berkeley's last three pedestrian fatalities were 79, 85 and 87 years old.
Meanwhile, a city program that gives free rides to seniors can't keep pace with demand, putting pedestrians — and drivers themselves — at risk, while the city lags in making headway on its goal to eliminate traffic deaths in the years ahead.
All three pedestrian fatalities in the past 12 months occurred in North Berkeley's District 5, one of the city's most senior districts.
Julia Elkin and Ben Brown were both in marked crosswalks when drivers struck them last year in February and November.
In January, Elise Lusk was crossing a barricaded intersection that lacks a stop sign and pedestrian markings when a driver hit her, resulting in critical injuries. She was pronounced dead at the hospital later that day.
Also, in South Berkeley last October, a 90-year-old driver seriously injured a man using a mobility scooter in a crosswalk.
In another case, an 82-year old driver exited his car on 580 and died after a truck struck him.
Kate Darby Rauch
"The unfortunate reality is that older drivers are both more at risk of their own selves being injured and injuring others when they're behind the wheel," said Ben Gerhardstein, of Walk Bike Berkeley, a street safety advocacy group. "This is something that the city of Berkeley needs to grapple with."
Walk Bike Berkeley has asked the city to collect and publish driver ages in its investigative reports. BPD does collect driver age data during collision investigations and traffic stops, but only the traffic stop statistics are readily available.
UC Berkeley traffic data show that, in the nine months from January until September 2024, drivers who were 70 or older were involved in 68 crashes in Berkeley, resulting in one fatality and 85 injuries.
Fourteen of the collisions involved pedestrians and six involved cyclists. This period includes Elkin, but not Brown, Lusk or the man on the mobility scooter.
Nationally, drivers over 80 years old and new drivers, age 16-17, have the highest rate of fatal crashes per mile driven, according to AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety.
Fatalities involving older drivers may be more frequent because they themselves have more difficulty surviving crashes.
Berkeley Aging Services administrators know that age doesn't have to limit seniors' independence or mobility, and the agency offers a wildly popular transportation program that allows elderly residents to get around safely.
The program, Berkeley Rides for Seniors and the Disabled, provides free van, shuttle and taxi rides and access to GoGo, a service that helps seniors and people with disabilities get free rides from Uber and Lyft.
The program's popularity spiked in 2021 to levels that outpaced its Alameda County-based Measure BB funding when the age requirement for eligibility dropped to 70 and ride-share services were added to the mix.
For the 2024 fiscal year, the program received $853,000 and serviced about 1,800 of Berkeley's estimated 11,000 seniors.
But 130 more potential riders are set to remain in queue for an estimated two to three months because the program needs more staff and funding to handle the demand, including paying for taxis and ride-shares and collecting program data.
Berkeley City Councilwoman Shoshana O'Keefe, whose District 5 term began in December, said some of her elderly neighbors have ditched their cars in favor of ride-shares, but it can be expensive.
"It's important to make sure this is available to everyone," she said.
In California, drivers who are 70 and older must renew their licenses in person at the DMV every five years.
Some renewals require the completion of a no-fail online course. And concerned caregivers, doctors and police can ask the DMV to require an in-person driving test.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and state Sen. Jesse Arreguín declined to comment on state laws regarding elderly drivers.
But Arreguín did point to his support of the 2018 Age-Friendly Berkeley Action Plan, adopted while he was Berkeley's mayor, under which the city expanded its senior rides program.
The three-year plan sought to address the needs of Berkeley’s aging population, which was estimated to "double by 2030, resulting in 1 in 5 adults being over 65," the city found.
Read more about traffic safety in Berkeley.
Councilwoman O’Keefe said she’s fully on board with facilitating safe mobility and independence for Berkeley seniors.
"In terms of long-term planning, I think the ride-share model is probably going to expand," she said. "I'm very interested in making that program better."
There may be more money for senior ride-shares in the pipeline already.
Measure FF, which Berkeley voters passed in 2020, provided $9.5 million to the Berkeley Fire Department in FY 2024-25 for hazard mitigation, including a new "street trauma prevention" program.
That effort aims to help BFD support the city's "Vision Zero" goals, a citywide plan to eliminate traffic-related fatalities and serious injury crashes
But progress has been slow.
BFD recently hired a program manager to further develop the street trauma prevention program, said Deputy Berkeley Fire Chief Keith May, and is still working to determine how much Measure FF money it can spend on senior transportation.
Kate Darby Rauch
The Berkeley City Council approved "Vision Zero" in 2018 but, seven years into its 10-year span, the program, which focuses on street improvements and traffic engineering, has yet to reduce the number of annual traffic fatalities and serious injuries in Berkeley.
And Berkeley Rides for Seniors and the Disabled is not included in the city's "Vision Zero" strategy, a city spokesperson said.
Earlier this month, in response to Elise Lusk's death, the Berkeley City Council approved an item from Councilman Mark Humbert asking the city to take a closer look at its barricaded intersections via an engineering study that could recommend adding stop signs and other safety-related infrastructure.
The item noted that, in addition to Lusk's death, a 7-year-old boy had been struck by a hit-and-run driver at a similar intersection on Halloween in 2023.
The boy survived the Halloween crash, but it left his family and the broader community shaken.
"We need to bear down with all force to end the traffic violence on our streets," Humbert wrote. "We need to continue apace to do whatever we can to protect the lives of pedestrians, cyclists and drivers."
Once Berkeley Public Works determines which traffic-slowing measures may work best for the city's barricaded intersections, staff plans to report back to the City Council.
But exactly when that might happen remains an open question.
The department is currently understaffed, Humbert said, and might need more money to complete the work.
Emilie Raguso
Council voted on Humbert's recent traffic safety item on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Julia Elkin's death.
Now, more than a year later, the city is still working on changes to slow traffic and improve sight lines on Marin Avenue where the collision happened.
Neighbors still maintain flowers at the intersection where the 37-year-old jogger was killed. The 85-year-old driver, also a neighbor, was charged with manslaughter. The case remains pending.
Gerhardstein of Walk Bike Berkeley said families, friends and community members can start conversations and help elders find alternatives to driving so they can get out safely and socialize.
"I think that there's a good reason for the city to play a role in providing older adults with mobility options," he said.
While Berkeley's huge investment in safer traffic infrastructure "is the most important way the city can pursue that Vision Zero goal," he added, "we also need to be augmenting that engineering work [by] finding ways for our older populations to get around without driving."
Liz Fox is a Berkeley-based journalist who has lived mostly in the East Bay since 2004. She's covered the ocean, hunger, immigration and health in San Francisco, the Central Valley, Mexico City, Washington, D.C. and New York. She lives to eat.
