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Study: Women better drivers than men

NFS4

NFS4

No Lifer
Washington - That age-old stereotype about dangerous women drivers is shattered in a large new traffic analysis: Male drivers have a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on miles driven.

And the author of the research says he takes it to heart when he travels - his wife takes the wheel.

"I put a mitt in my mouth and ride shotgun," said David Gerard, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who co-authored the major new U.S. road risk analysis.

The study holds plenty of surprises:

The highway death rate is higher for cautious 82-year-old women than for risk-taking 16- year-old boys.

New England is the safest region for motorists, despite all those stories about crazy Boston drivers.

The safest passenger is a youngster strapped in a car seat and being driven during morning rush hour.

Traffic fatalities for male drivers in the period studied were more than triple those for female drivers. This was, in part, because there are simply more men driving than women. But when researchers compared the number of deaths per "person mile" driven for each gender, they found men still had a much higher risk of death. For every 100 million "person miles" driven, there were 1.35 male deaths versus .77 female deaths.

The findings are from Traffic STATS, a detailed and searchable new risk analysis of road-fatality statistics by Carnegie Mellon for the American Automobile Association. Plans are to make the report public next week, but the AP got an early look.

The analysis shows that some long-held assumptions about safety on U.S. highways don't jibe with hard numbers. It lists the risk of road death by age, gender, type of vehicle, time of day and geographic region.

"We are finding comparisons that are surprising all the time," said study co-author Paul Fischbeck, a Carnegie Mellon professor of social and decision sciences. "What is necessary now is to go through and do that second level of analysis to figure out why some of these things are true."

For example, those 82-year-old women are 60 percent more likely to die on the road than a 16-year-old boy because they are so frail, said Anne McCartt, a research official at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who was not part of the study.

"It's an issue not of risk-taking behavior but of fragility," McCartt said. The elderly are more likely to die when injured in an accident, she said, which Gerard and Fischbeck validate.

These elderly women have the nation's highest road-death risks even when they're not driving - five times higher than the national average.

Right behind octogenarians in high risk are young male drivers ages 16 to 23, with fatality rates four times higher than average.

That can be attributed to "inexperience and immaturity," McCartt said.

Drivers in their 40s and 50s tie for the lowest risk of dying in an accident. But if you're a male out at 2 a.m. Saturday on a motorcycle in the South, you may want to take out more insurance.

By combining a batch of data of all types, one can construct the safest possible scenario on the road: a 4-year-old girl in a van or school bus, stuck in a Wednesday morning rush-hour traffic in New England in February.

Of all the ages to be in a car, 4-year-olds have the lowest death risks - probably because they are in child car seats and their parents drive more carefully, Fischbeck said.

"They are really protected. They're being driven around in times of day when it's very safe (and often in minivans)," he said. "It's a win-win-win-win situation."

As for men being more likely to die than women, McCartt and Fischbeck said men take more risks, speed more, drink and drive more.

"They do stupider things," said Fischbeck, a former military pilot who has twin toddlers and a "totally unsafe" 1974 Volkswagen Thing.

The study didn't get into specific car makes but found larger vans to be the safest, with a death rate less than half the national average for cars.

"It's a combination of they're safe, and the people who drive them are dull," Fischbeck said.

School buses, driven during normally safe hours, have a death rate that is one-50th that of average passenger vehicles.

But the death rate on motorcycles was nearly 32 times higher than for cars.

The most deadly hour is at 2 a.m., which is often when bars close, and many deaths are alcohol-related, Fischbeck said.
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http://www.denverpost.com/rockies/ci_5042105
 
that doesn't say that women are better drivers, it says that men (particularly young men) take more retarded risks.

and that's what we've been saying.

men are better drivers, but drive recklessly. women are worse drivers, but only drive negligently.
 
All the 16-23 yr old males are going to be thrilled to find out that the only people with higher death rates are 82 yr old women. :laugh:
 
Tell that to the bimbos I deal with daily on the 405, speeding along at 80mph and unable to hold their lane because they are talking on their cell phone, applying makeup, smoking a cigarette AND drinking their soy vanilla no whip low fat frappa crappa lattes.



 
I was once read that men tend to drive more often at the edge of their abilities than women do and thus end up in more catastrophic accidents. Woman do more stupid crap like hit stationary objects (parked cars, mailboxes, etc...) and back-up into ditches and such. In my experience this is true. So I guess it depends on how you define "better". I think men, in general, have better driving skills, but when they exceed them the results are often worse.
 
Originally posted by: yosuke188
That simply is not true, and I refuse to believe otherwise.
Click to expand...

Check this site out: http://hope.hss.cmu.edu/

This is Carnelgie Mellon TrafficSTATS (STAtistic on Travel Safety)

Introduction
TrafficSTATS (STAtistics on Travel Safety) is a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon University and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety (AAAFTS). The TrafficSTATS website provides users with an interactive tool to query information about multiple dimensions of traffic-safety risks.
Calculations are made using information from two widely-used national databases, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). Combining information from these two sources provides access to travel -risk calculations that go far beyond what can be found elsewhere (either online or in print). Users can explore the travel risks for millions of different combinations of transportation modes, demographic variables, and a host of other parameters. Users can also query selected information from the FARS and NHTS databases.



Proceed to the application and generate a report by clicking on Gender. After analyzing the data presented, you will conclude that clearly, women driver are safer driver but the question is:

Does it make them better driver?

I would tend to say YES unless somebody can prove me wrong.


Edit: The OP's article is based on data from the site linked in this post.
 
All that shows is deaths, not total incidents.

Women are involved in far more incidents, but when men wreck a car, it's vastly more likely to be a fatality.

ZV
 
Originally posted by: Number1
Proceed to the application and generate a report by clicking on Gender. After analyzing the data presented, you will conclude that clearly, women driver are safer driver but the question is:

Does it make them better driver?

I would tend to say YES unless somebody can prove me wrong.
Click to expand...
Was Dale Earnhardt a better driver than my grandfather? Yes. But my Grandfather was a safer driver.

ZV
 
Originally posted by: Zenmervolt
All that shows is deaths, not total incidents.

Women are involved in far more incidents, but when men wreck a car, it's vastly more likely to be a fatality.

ZV
Click to expand...

Look, can you come up with credible data to prove your point of view? I doubt it.
 
Originally posted by: Zenmervolt
Originally posted by: Number1
Proceed to the application and generate a report by clicking on Gender. After analyzing the data presented, you will conclude that clearly, women driver are safer driver but the question is:

Does it make them better driver?

I would tend to say YES unless somebody can prove me wrong.
Click to expand...
Was Dale Earnhardt a better driver than my grandfather? Yes. But my Grandfather was a safer driver.

ZV
Click to expand...

Dale is also very much dead
 
Originally posted by: Number1
Proceed to the application and generate a report by clicking on Gender. After analyzing the data presented, you will conclude that clearly, women driver are safer driver but the question is:

Does it make them better driver?

I would tend to say YES unless somebody can prove me wrong.


Edit: The OP's article is based on data from the site linked in this post.
Click to expand...

Statistically, I'm a safe skiier--I've never broken a boke while skiing, and when I wipe out, I hit the slope rather than trees or structures.

Does that make me a better skiier? NO, that's a laughable conclusion. Millions of people in the world could ski circles around me.

Women are "safer" (less likely to cause fatal accidents) drivers, but most race car drivers are men. That's because for many women, it's just about getting from point A to point B. They learn the minimum amount of skill needed to do so, and they get their license. For men, it's the whole experience...except that many men never bother to learn the skills and control that they need for higher performance driving. Hence, fatal accidents...
 
Originally posted by: jagec
Originally posted by: Number1
Proceed to the application and generate a report by clicking on Gender. After analyzing the data presented, you will conclude that clearly, women driver are safer driver but the question is:

Does it make them better driver?

I would tend to say YES unless somebody can prove me wrong.


Edit: The OP's article is based on data from the site linked in this post.
Click to expand...

Statistically, I'm a safe skiier--I've never broken a boke while skiing, and when I wipe out, I hit the slope rather than trees or structures.

Does that make me a better skiier? NO, that's a laughable conclusion. Millions of people in the world could ski circles around me.

Women are "safer" (less likely to cause fatal accidents) drivers, but most race car drivers are men. That's because for many women, it's just about getting from point A to point B. They learn the minimum amount of skill needed to do so, and they get their license. For men, it's the whole experience...except that many men never bother to learn the skills and control that they need for higher performance driving. Hence, fatal accidents...
Click to expand...

So, after reading your comment I've come to the conclusion that men are worse drivers than women. You just said that men drive for the experience but then don't learn the skills to control their cars like that. Does that not, in effect, make them worse drivers? To drive beyond your capabilities, knowing the consequences, proves to you that men are better drivers? Maybe they're better drivers but they sure seem far dumber.
 
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