ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Who make better drivers, men or women? The answer to the question that dates back to the invention of the automobile depends on how you look at the figures.
Using statistics from a 1990 national survey, University of Michigan researchers found that while male drivers have more traffic accidents, women drivers have a higher rate of accidents per mile driven.
According to the study, men drive a greater share of the miles than women (63 percent to 37 percent) and are involved in a higher proportion of traffic accidents (59 percent to 41 percent). But female motorists have a greater rate of accidents per mile driven than men.
On a per-mile basis, the researchers reported, women have a 16 percent higher risk of involvement in any police-reported accident and a 26 percent greater chance of an accident resulting in injury on a per- mile basis. However, male drivers are 50 percent more likely to have a fatal accident.
'The results showing women to have higher rates in non-fatal accidents are somewhat surprising,' said researchers Kenneth L. Campbell and Dawn L. Massie of the U-M Transportation Research Institute.
Previous research shows that male drivers, especially young men, tend to speed or drive too fast for conditions more often than female drivers, go through yellow lights more frequently, accept shorter gaps when entering the traffic stream or turning left before oncoming traffic, drive more aggressively, wear safety belts less often, and drink and drive more often.
'It seems plausible that men's higher fatal involvement rate compared to women is at least partly attributable to men's increased propensity to drive in a risky manner, but this result is not observed in the non-fatal accident rate,' Campbell and Massie said.
They said more research needs to be done to determine why women have a higher overall accident rate than men, but they offer some possible explanations:
'Women, on average, drive fewer miles than men,' they said. 'It has been suggested that the accident rate per mile decreases as the number of miles driven increases. The argument is that the more experienced drivers do a better job of avoiding accidents.
Other possible reasons for the disparity in crash rates, they said, may include gender-related differences in travel patterns and the possibility that women have slower reaction times and/or are more prone to distraction and perceptual errors than men.
Their findings also reveal that, based on miles driven, teen-age drivers are about three times more likely to have any kind of auto accident, fatal and non-fatal, compared with all other motorists. Likewise, drivers at least 75 years old are twice as apt to be involved in an accident and nearly four times as likely to be involved in a fatal crash compared with other drivers.
The U-M study was sponsored by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
