Who is more likely to die on the road?
A new report from the States has some interesting statistics, firstly, I could've easily named this post "Women are better drivers than men" because that is also one of the findings of the study, but fortunately, my ego got in the way and instead I deicded to concentrate on the more amusing results of the research, which goes into detail about the safest and unsafest drivers on the road. Firstly, the good news (sort of), elderly women are by far more likely to get themselves killed on the road than teenage boys.
But before I talk a bit more about that, lets get the bad news out of the way, the research found that male drivers have a 77% higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on kms driven. So yes, thats what the study has found, we, the male sex, are willing to take far more risks on the road (e.g. drink drive, speed, take risks on the road) surprise surprise...
"They do stupider things," said said study co-author Paul Fischbeck, a Carnegie Mellon professor of social and decision sciences,
So now back to the good news! If the Australian State Governments would take some notice of this research which shows a death rate is higher for cautious 82-year-old women than for Learner 16-year-old boys, than perhaps all these draconian laws would be abolished.
The research showed that in America about one death occurs for every 160 million passenger kms.
"We are finding comparisons that are surprising all the time," said s Paul Fischbeck. "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."
Of course, young male drivers are again found to be right up there in high risk section of dying on the road with drivers aged 16-23 having a fatality rate four times higher than average. Seems like when you hit 40, and your life starts slowing down and you've settled yourself (or are just about to go through a mid life crisis), you become an extremely capable driver. Drivers aged 40 and 50 tie for the lowest risk of dying in an accident.
From the research it was evident that the safest person to be on the road was a 4-year-old strapped in the back of the car in a child seat, as they have the lowest death risks. Most likely due to the child car seats and their parents driving more carefully.
"They are really protected, they're being driven around in times of day when it's very safe (and often in minivans)," Fischbeck said.
To add some more fuel to the fire, the ever more obvious fact that motorcycles were unsafe was portrayed clearly in this study, but just how clearly is surprising. They study found that dying on a bike was nearly 32 times more likely than dying in a car. 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.
And the worse time you can drive? 2 a.m on a weekend morning when the masses are leaving the bars/clubs and heading home, tired, drunk, or under the influence of drugs. And the safest time to be on the road? 8 a.m, because who is going to die in a peak hour traffic? Or as the author suggests, it also has something todo with teenagers being in school!
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