Elderly Women Drivers More At Risk Than Teen Boys

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Male Drivers At Higher Risk Than Women, Report Finds


WASHINGTON -- 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 CSIR Center for the study and improvement of Regulation

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."

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, 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 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 some 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. "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.

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.

School buses, massive vehicles 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. 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.

That explains New England's No. 1 ranking for lowest death risk on the road, she said.

Heavy traffic "makes it much more difficult for people to speed," McCartt said.

Study: Elderly Women Drivers More At Risk Than Teen Boys - Automotive
 

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Elderly driving like this ?

but... not even think about other young people are driving high speed and roar pass by the other others.. can be lead scare them and shook become freak accident. Who fault?
Will blame to Elderly.. Wha.. a joke?
I believe young drivers who driving crazy hell and speed cut their way because young drivers thinks "I'm pro driver" not even think about caring other humans who are driving on the road as safety..

Oh well..
Hard to say Needless, State of State or Provincial of Provincial are not study enough as well...
I've seen my own eyes what I'm seen young drivers always tend cut my way.. Really scare me out of death.. geez.. I did *press the horn hell hard* I can see distance the young driver pulled their hand up.. you know what their say?















































,,|,, How's so nice what their say? *ahem*
 
Women just drive during rush-hour on highways less, they aren't "safer" as claimed.

As a highway engineer, I'm calling "shenanigans":

other studies (and NHTSA.gov's raw data) have shown that women aren't SAFER or BETTER drivers, they just drive more of their miles on lower-speed (local) roads rather than highways, and drive less of their miles during rush-hour, because less women have jobs far from home and less jobs during "normal business hours," i.e. rush hour, which has more collisions & fatalities per million miles than non-rush hours of the day.
I know this as a civil engineer, but I'm sure it must be common knowledge as well? In fact, women have MORE COLLISONS, just LESS FATALITIES, and the patterns of WHEN/WHERE men vs. women drive explain this, rather than either gender being "better" or "worse" than one another.

But of course, some dipsh1t journalists have taken this study -- obviously written by a sexist or axe-grinding pseudo-scientist since he contradicts so many of his colleagues who've already pointed out the flaws inherent in his study, and it's hard to believe this "scientist" would be ignorant of what other scientists have already published, so I doubt this flawed study was just accidental, seems more like propaganda -- and journalists put the catchy headline on it, despite that the entire article is based on what is called a


Post Hoc Fallacy of logic


(i.e. "commonality is not causality,"
and in this case, the other factors ACTUALLY CAUSING men to die more often in collisions -- these factors are "WHEN AND WHERE" males vs. females tend to drive, rather than "HOW" they drive and one gender being "better" drivers than the other gender -- the "when/where" factors which this particular scientist ignored, were ALREADY uncovered by his colleagues). Really, this is just sensationalistic journalism that is more befitting of The National Enquirer than the Associated Press; please journalists, stop "playing scientist" and buying into the correlative results of this one study despite that it is contradicted by many studies which provided CAUSAL results by eliminating the Post Hoc fallacy in their methodology; if you were scientists rather than muck-raking yellow journalists willing to believe -- and pass-on to the public -- fallacious logic and flawed science such as this study, then you'd have realized that this has already been debunked this as junk-science, i.e. it's a Post Hoc fallacy. But so long as it makes a catchy headline you'll print it, right, isn't that your raison d'etre, rather than an honest and thorough review of this issue?
 
There's an old saying that says "Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth!"
 
i don't agree with the article. He says that New England is the safest region for drivers, I don't agree. There are so many crazy drivers cutting in and out in traffic, close calls and so on. My dad almost got in accident 10 times in a day when driving in NYC area. I would say that East US have the worst behaved drivers than in the West, except California.
 
i don't agree with the article. He says that New England is the safest region for drivers, I don't agree. There are so many crazy drivers cutting in and out in traffic, close calls and so on. My dad almost got in accident 10 times in a day when driving in NYC area. I would say that East US have the worst behaved drivers than in the West, except California.

That's because people in new england know how to drive.
 
That's because people in new england know how to drive.

Nope, that is so far from the truth it ain't funny.

I had to privilege to be in NE many times (I have relatives up there). Most of those folks are worst than New Yorkers (and they are bad themselves).
 
I am New England driver with almost clean driving record! (expect few illegal parking) :D

Between Boston and New York City were not pretty to drive....I survived down there so far and to be contunie....:ugh2:
 
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