Posted on 01/19/2007 10:19:15 AM PST by Ben Mugged
That age-old stereotype about dangerous women drivers is shattered in a big 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 a 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 drivers - 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.
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."
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.ask.com ...
How is the risk of dying in a car accident proof of anyone's driving ability? Passengers die in car wrecks too!
As previously mentioned, other factors like drunk driving, aggressiveness, type of vehicle driven and so forth play a much larger role in the death rate.
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