Posted on 01/19/2007 8:40:25 AM PST by devane617
WASHINGTON -- The co-author of new research that shows male drivers have a greater risk of dying in a car accident than women -- based on miles driven -- takes his research 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 a major new U.S. road risk analysis.
The study's 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 drivers, despite stories about crazy Boston drivers.
The safest passenger is a youngster strapped in a car seat and being driven during morning rush hour.
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 Associated Press got an early look.
The analysis calculates that overall, about one death occurs for every 100 million passenger miles traveled. And it 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 dangerous 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 of 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," she said. The elderly are more likely to die when they are injured in an accident, she said, an explanation that 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 16-23 with fatality rates four times higher than average.
That can be attributed to "inexperience and immaturity," McCartt said.
Drivers aged 40 and 50 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, you can construct the safest possible scenario on the road: That would involve a 4-year-old girl in a van or school bus, stuck in a Wednesday morning rush hour 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)," Fischbeck said.
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.
Fischbeck's 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, and the drivers themselves played a role.
"It's a combination of they're safe and the people who drive them are dull," Fischbeck said.
The death rate on motorcycles was nearly 32 times higher than for cars. One of the riskiest combinations in the database are men between ages 21 and 24 who drive motorcycles between midnight and 4 a.m. Their road fatality risk is 45,000 times higher than normal.
The most deadly hour is at 2 a.m., which is often when bars close and many deaths are alcohol-related, Fischbeck said.
The fewest deaths per mile driven are at 8 a.m., mostly because the roads are so clogged with traffic -- and teenage drivers are in school, McCartt said.
Wow. I thought it would be close, but not this close.
Here is a thread on the PMSNBC original of the same story:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1770136/posts
The key error is that death rate does not equal accident rate or causation rate. However, it does correctly point out that the elderly are more likely to die than a healthy younger person from the same injury.
What makes them think that?
I was thinking that women might have better aim.
Sounds like natural (self) selection, to me.
The additional bonus is that these MENSA types rarely take anyone else out with themselves.
I thought the frail condition of some seniors would tend to skew the results.
Nah...
It's a biological thing. Something about the shoulder joint.
Wait.
You mean in a car?
Well, I haven't driven nearly as much as some, but a lot of the miles I have driven were on "death alleys", such as Hwy 4 and I5 in the California Central Valley and, in my experience, 80% of all drivers, both sexes and all ages are "aimers", not drivers. Their apparent skill at driving seems limited to sort of knowing which way to turn the wheel.
Defensive driving? What's that? Turn signals? They still have those on cars? Mirrors? Whazzat?
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.
Also, in the Gerard household, only his wife is allowed to handle the TV remote control, said Gerard.
"And my wife selects the clothes we wear each day," added Gerard. "Usually, she wears pants and I wear a nice patterned skirt."
The death rate on motorcycles was nearly 32 times higher than for cars. One of the riskiest combinations in the database are men between ages 21 and 24 who drive motorcycles between midnight and 4 a.m. Their road fatality risk is 45,000 times higher than normal.
"Sounds like natural (self) selection, to me.
The additional bonus is that these MENSA types rarely take anyone else out with themselves."
Unfortunately it does the same thing as war and other dangerous activities, it reduces the number of free thinking masculine men, and increases the effects of the weak and cautious males.
I'm pretty sure that it's illegal for insurers to use race when calculating their actuarial tables [or at least the publically-available actuarial tables that determine rates], but if the insurers have the races of their customers on file, then it would be trivial for them to run the numbers to see what the effect of race would be.
And certainly the highway patrolmen who fill out the accident reports note the races of the "victims" [participants] involved in the wrecks.
More generally, it would be interesting to see how the IQ of the driver correlates with the driver's probability of getting in a wreck.
And there has got to be something [more than mere myth] to this general perception of mexican illegals as much more likely to be drunk, much more likely to be uninsured, much more likely to instigate hit & runs, etc etc etc.
I put a mitt in my mouth and ride shotgun," said David Gerard, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who co-authored a major new U.S. road risk analysis.
__________________________________________________________
LOL.....my husband will love this. He hates driving but he me driving even more.
They only studied fatal auto accidents; the rate for men dying was about three to one for women; which is why I said that the women only targeted men.
[....in my experience, 80% of all drivers, both sexes and all ages are "aimers", not drivers.]
I have said this for years. But I was not clever enough to coin the term aimers. So true. I lived in the San Fran Bay area for three years. My biggest complaint about the drivers were their complete lack of awareness for anything going on around them. Stay in one lane no matter what is happening around you. Drive in the lane you want no matter how fast traffic around you is traveling. Stop on the road to pick up your dropped doughnut. Ignore that trucker's turn signal, he is only kidding about needing to get into your lane.
While I do not recommend this, I perfected an effective tactic for getting into a lane to exit when no one would acknowledge my turn signal to let me in. I call it the West Coast Swerve. I would, after having my signal on for a while pick a spot with some sqeeze room and jink my vehicle toward the lane I wanted in. They touched the brakes and a spot opened up in the lane I was trying to move to.
Kids, don't try this at home. I am older and more mature now.
Those that most resemble an Abrams tank and least resemble a Mini-Cooper.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.